


Honor Returned: Book 2

by Blue_Sunshine



Series: Honor Returned [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Aang & Zuko friendship, Airbending & Airbenders, Azula is awesome and terrifying, Ba Sing Se, Beifong's A+ parenting, Children in War, Cultural Differences, Culture is important, Dragons, Enemies to Friends, Fire Nation Royal Family is a Mess, Gen, History is important, Iroh (Avatar) is a Good Uncle, Mentions of genocide, Order of the White Lotus, Ozai (Avatar) Being a Terrible Parent, Politics, Prisoner of War, Secret Societies, Sibling Rivalry, Spirit Visions, Spirits, The Painted Lady - Freeform, Toph Being Awesome, Work In Progress, actual treason, fire sages - Freeform, marines are good smugglers, mentions of treason, some incidents of violence, supposedly, world-building
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-06-10 03:24:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 42,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15282528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Sunshine/pseuds/Blue_Sunshine
Summary: Capturing the Avatar was supposed to have been the hard part. That had been the plan. But any decent commander will tell you that the plan never really survives first contact with the enemy.





	1. Chapter 1

Zuko manages to walk with a straight back and squared shoulders, his hand still marching the Avatar, all the way back out of the chamber and into the corridor, and stand tall until the great doors sealed shut once more.

He could feel his fathers presence cut out behind him like a lantern snuffed at dawn, and sagged, releasing the Avatar so he could stagger to the wall and just….brace himself up.

_I survived._ Zuko thinks, shaking. _I actually survived that. Agni, thank you._

“Prince Zuko, how may we serve?” Lieutenant Kotone inquired, her voice clear and clipped. Right.

Zuko looks up, and the Fire Sages are murmuring to each other nearby, and Lieutenant Kotone’s team have taken up their flanking positions around the avatar.

“The prison built to hold the Avatar.” Zuko says. “I need to see it.”

“Of course.” Elder Yamato looks his way, inclining his wizened head and gesturing towards another Sage of similar age – one who had not made the journey with them. “Elder Zun Li.” He introduces, another High Sage.

“Honorable Elder.” Zuko bows. Zun Li is a much paler man than Yamato, and his age has marked him more deeply – stars film in his brown eyes, symptomatic of failing sight, and his back stoops, where otherwise he’d have been quite a tall man indeed. He’s bald, though his brows where full and long, and a whispy goatee marked his chin. He had the ink-stained hands of a historian, gnarled though they were, and Zuko could feel the strength of his chi from where he stood. Humbled by his age he may have been, but Zuko wasn’t fool enough to think he’d been weakened by it.

“Honored I am, Prince Zuko.” The Elder nods, gold glittering on his cowl. “Allow me to show you the way, if I might?”

“Of course.” Zuko nods graciously, for which the elder smiles with thin, age-spotted lips, seeming pleased. A younger sage, an acolyte, no doubt, hands the elder a cane as he moves to walk, and Zuko’s guards fall in line, Aang huddled between them.

Zuko watches the cane as they are led deeper into the palace, towards more discreet passages, listening to the rhythmic shuffle-shuffle-tap of the elders’ uneven gait. It takes him three corridors to recognize the pattern on the cane – it’s ringed in lotus flowers.

Zuko broods over that, some inkling of greater connections looming upon his thoughts as they travel beneath the palace itself, into secret passages and down the old lava tunnels, beyond the underground shelters.

A long narrow corridor leads to an open chamber with a high ceiling. Vents let in some natural light, and the shadow of thick bars, and aside from that lanterns at regular intervals keep the metal-plated cavern well lit, at least on their side of the room.

It’s a barren chamber, and at the far end is a cage, a cot, four chains bolted to the bars, not unlike the prison at Pohai Stronghold, and a chamber pot.

Aang whimpers, and Ensign Yan Hui’s grip on the airbenders arm tightens briefly, dull grey eyes flashing for a moment in what might have been sympathy. Sergeant Nishi’s eyes narrow critically, but the archer gives nothing away. Zuko wonders how old her children are, and how deeply she prays for them at this moment.

“This will not suit.” Zuko declares tightly, his eyes returning darkly to the chains inside the cage. The air is dry, hot, and stifled, and even though he can see the sky, he cannot feel the sun. This was a prison designed to cripple everyone, of every nation, and he can feel it weigh upon him too. No sky, no sea, with fire and stone held just out of reach.

“I assure you, Prince Zuko,” Zun Li rasps sternly, the Elder Sage’s hands clasped over his cane. “this cell will hold an Avatar.”

“Of that I have no doubt.” Zuko acknowledges bitterly, turning to look fiercely at the Sages. “But I say it will not suit.”

The High Elder sighs thinly, the sound half a groan, and turns to murmur to Elder Yamato, who whispers back in his ear. The younger sages clasp their hands, but their eyes are somewhat wide, as they glance between their elders and their crown prince.

Lieutenant Kotone stands in the background, as firm and inscrutable as a blade, and Master Sergeant Hisao stands beside her like a mountain, his eyes on the floor, the half-sun ornament in his hair gleaming dully. Zuko can’t see his expression, but he can feel the energy of the veteran’s opinion. It is more than disapproval, than distaste, of this place. It is disgust, and it is a feeling Zuko shares, deep in his belly, when he thinks of those that built this cage. It is a horrible place for a child, yes they all agree on that, but Zuko would not have put an elder man here either.

The elders quiet, and Yamato turns back towards Zuko, while Zun Li hides his mouth behind gnarled knuckles, and looks thoughtful, his scarred gaze watching Zuko with an air of judgement. “And how would you have it done, Prince Zuko?” The High Elder of Shu Jing inquires gravely.

Zuko looks back across the room, towards the little cell, and swallows, eyeing the high walls, and the sunlight shafts, the heavy air pressing down at him.

“Avatar Aang is only half-trained. He knows nothing of Earth and Fire.” Zuko says, wondering how his voice doesn’t tremble with his heart in his throat. “Cast the cell and the chains. I want the bars here, from floor to ceiling.” He points towards the floor, where the torches stop. “I want a fountain there, and mirrors in each corner so he can hide nothing behind his back.”

“A fountain, Prince Zuko? He’s a master waterbender!” A younger Sage protests.

“Who still needs to bathe.” Zuko retorts flatly. “A fountain.” He insists. “Far from the bars. A proper futon, and a privacy screen for that chamber pot.”

“A privacy screen? Surely not! He’s a prisoner!” The Sage protests again.

“He’s a twelve-year old pacifist, Master Sage.” Zuko grits out, feeling his palms grow hot as his fists clench. “Not a monster.” _And neither am I!_

“Do you not feel that is too much a risk, Prince Zuko?” Elder Zun Li inquires softly. “Whomever else Young Aang may be, he _is_ the Avatar.”

“Yes, he is the Avatar.” Zuko acknowledges grimly. “And it is a risky thing indeed, to try and put the Spirit Of The World in a cage. We mortals do what we must do, Elder Sage, but our spirits must still answer for that one day.”

The Elders’ eyes flash, and both bow. There is nothing more one could say.


	2. Chapter 2

“I hate to break it to you, Uncle, but I think your nephew has dropped off the map!” Toph exclaims, stamping her feet into the grass. “There’s no one out here, and I mean no one.” Her voice quiets at the end, and the earthbender chews her lip.

No lost nephew.

No Twinkletoes.

No Sweetness or Snoozles.

They’d left her, _really_ left her. Yeah, well, sure, she left first, but she was gonna come _back_!

Except…

Except they weren’t there to go back to. They weren’t anywhere.

This wasn’t a particularly populous part of the Earth Kingdom. A few ghost towns, a few shuttered villages and a remote farm or two, but aside from that? Nada, not until you headed west to Gao Ling or north through the desert. If they’d been around, she’d know it.

Which meant those idiots hopped on Appa and _left_.

Her.

She swallows the lump in her throat and refuses to sniffle. She isn’t going to cry over those jerks. She left home for them, she left her mom and dad and…and…

“That is troubling news, miss Toph.” ‘Mushi’ sighs wearily. Toph shuts off her train of thought and turns her attention back towards him. Poor old man had been downright heartsick when they lost his nephews trail. He tried to be cheerful, and he told good stories, but Toph could still _feel_ it. She’d stuck with him when it became clear she wasn’t gonna find anyone else. Uncle wasn’t a local, that much she could tell, and if he and his nephew were travelling, well, she’d take adventure where she could get it!

She actually really kinda liked the old man.

Whoever this nephew was, he was one lucky kid.

Though he probably deserved a few lumps for making his Uncle worry. Kids weren’t just supposed to disappear on old people – it stressed them out too much.

“Hey, don’t sweat it too much, Uncle! Your nephew sounds like a tough kid.” Toph tries to pat him on the arm, but misses. Uncle puts off a lot more heat than most people, and she sometimes can’t tell exactly how far away his body is, even when he’s standing still. “He’ll be okay.”

“My nephew has an enduring spirit.” Mushi sighs deeply, groaning as he shifts and stretches his back. “But to endure, one must suffer.”

Sheesh. That was dour. “Er….right.” Toph nods awkwardly.

“My apologies, miss Toph.” Mushi shakes his head, and she can hear the bristly shuff of him rubbing at his whiskers. “I should not trouble you so with an old mans’ morose thoughts.”

“It’s alright.” Toph shrugs, picking at the grass with her toes. “You’re worried, I get it.”

“You are most gracious.” He smiles, his voice warming.

Oh man, that’s a laugh. Toph breathes in deep and listens to the breeze, and the susurrus of waving grass and clattering twigs, and the…

“Hey uncle, we being circled by a buzzard-eagle?” Toph asks, tilting her head. She may have been dragging after a rough few weeks, but she wasn’t that bad off! She can hear the soft whistle of a glide, and the occasional snap of silky wings, drifting closer.

“A sparrow-hawk.” Mushi says, voice rumbling a little deep down. “A messenger bird, in fact.”

Toph sank her toes into the dirt, and frowned. Sparrow-hawks were messenger birds all right – _for the Fire Nation_. In the Earth-Kingdom, they preferred to use people for that. People, and really fast ostrich-horses. She’d even heard rumors that Ba Sing Se had figured out how to use earth-benders to send special messages over long distance _through the ground_. That one, she definitely had to feel one day!

“Somebody you know?” She inquires a little snidely. Oh, she’d guessed he wasn’t proper earth kingdom right from the start, but there were a lot of accents in the neutral islands that couldn’t be told apart, and then, of course, there were the colonies…

‘Mushi’ huffs a small chuckle in her direction and she hears the small snap of a cap being removed. “Indeed it is.”

Toph listens to him unroll a crisp layer of paper, and then his heartbeat starts doing all sorts of wonky things. Shock and anger and fear, it felt like, and then something softly proud and sad, and then he took a steady breath, and another, and Toph couldn’t feel how he was feeling at all. It just all smoothed out, the energy of his chi soothing and condensing in a way no one she’d ever met was capable of. Yeah, she had her suspicions.

“Uncle?” She asks.

“I must return home.” He says smoothly, and she can imagine that he must look calm, perhaps even serene. Only, _no one_ whose chi burned that hot could possibly be serene.

“…to the Fire Nation?” Toph braves. Uncle was no old lizard-dog, gone soft and weak in his age, but she was the best earthbender in the world. If he took offense, she could take him.

Or at the very least she was sure she could escape him.

After all, she’d never fought a Firebender before.

“You…knew?” He sounds surprised, but he doesn’t feel it. Uncle ‘Mushi’ was tricky that way, she’d learned.

“I guessed.” Toph shrugs. “What’s the Fire Nation like?”

“Beautiful.” He sounds so wistful. “And dangerous.” And then he sounds… _bitter_.

Toph chews her lip, kneading the ground with her toes. “Uncle, what did the letter say? Is it – is it about your nephew?”

“It is.” He sighs shortly, tension thrumming through his frame, soothed by another calming breath. “Forgive me, miss Toph, but I do not believe you would be very fond of me if you were to know its contents.”

Well, wasn’t that foreboding, and an absolute dare?

“Try me.” Toph sticks out her chin, crossing her arms.

She can’t see him, obviously, but she can feel him studying her, in the next long minute, the way she’s felt sloth-tigers size up badger-bears in the wild, all slow calculation and predatory instinct.

Whatever he’s looking for, when he’s looking at her, he apparently finds it.

“This letter is informing me that my nephew, Prince Zuko, has captured the Avatar.” Iroh says with deadly calm. “And brought him to the Fire Lord.”

“Well….spirits.” Toph whispers, feeling her bones shiver with dread.

That was not what she was expecting.


	3. Chapter 3

Zuko doesn’t remember the whispers being quite so loud before, when the nobles hid them behind painted fans and draping sleeves, tucked away in corners and garden alcoves. They always looked so very surprised to see him – wide eyed and stilted, before they remembered to bow and offer pleasantries.

The ones who would offer pleasantries.

Others… _Spirits_ , they must think he’s still thirteen, and can’t tell steel from silk.

They’d never speak to his sister that way. Whether they feared, admired, or hated her, Azula had commanded respect from the day grandfather died, casting off the shield of naivety provided by being her mothers’ princess and taking up the sword of being her fathers’ soldier.

Every shifted eye and swished sleeve makes him wonder what they think of him, what allowance’s they make in their minds to treat him as they do – as if he were not Azula’s brother, as if he were not the crown prince in truth, as if he had not crossed a world at war and brought back an entity every child of the islands had feared for more than a century.

Do they think him a fool? Do they think him a puppet? Do they think him weak or cowardly?

He is not his sister, not prodigious, not cruel.

But he is still his fathers’ son.

He is not so forgiving as he once might have been.

Nishi’s dark archer’s eyes track the latest pair of whisperers down the long hall and out of sight, the Yu Yan tattoo’s making them seem far darker than they were. Yan Hui merely drummed his fingers. Along the hilts of his needle-point daggers. Zuko looks aside, and a delicate brown brow lifts over dull grey eyes, bland and inquiring.

Zuko sighs, shakes his head, and proceeds into the Grand Assembly Hall, where many nobles and governors, or else their representatives, milled and mingled. Courtiers flitted among them, and the occasional artisan, wives and children and advisors flocking together as they wheeled around each lord’s circle of influence. Beautiful strands of colored glass where strung among the beams of the high ceiling, cascading color across the room, and small tables where laden with delicate finger-food and fancies, catered to by servants bustling discreetly along the shadowed edges of the hall, and under the arches that opened to the blossoming gardens.

Spring was a busy time among the court, and among the capitol itself, when the lords and governor’s and high officers made their personal reports to the Fire Lord and his council, and pre-summer trade boomed for supplies to bolster the islands through summer – seeds and grain, timber and oil, labor and mining contracts. It was a time for acquaintances to be made and deals struck.

As a child, Zuko had been largely bored by it all – too young to understand the councils, assemblies, and even the more personal dealings, made over tea in quiet corners, and not yet old enough to attend the gala’s, much of his experience had been limited to the banquets, where he was instructed to sit still and smile politely as the nobles made their way around to his father and uncle and grandfather.

Ironically, those early springs had been one of the few times he and Azula truly got along, sneaking through servant passageways and snooping through the rooms of the palace guests while all the adults where busy elsewhere.

“Ya-ya? Ya-ya!” A surprised question turns into a high, gleeful yip, and Zuko turns his good side towards the sound as Yan Hui’s mouth thins out and his shoulders hunch slightly with a muffled groan.

A young courtier skips towards them, strings of pearls bouncing from her up-done hair as her face lit with a beaming smile, skirts gathered in hand. Her clothes are layers upon layers of sheer, glossy fabric in varying shades of shifting pink, and Zuko recognizes the swirling cloud pattern on her thick silver bracelets as being of Yoakekuma – Yan Hui and Ty Lee’s clan. She must be of their lords’ family.

“Lady Hana.” Yan Hui bows fluidly, turning in the same motion to flip his greeting into an introduction. “Crown Prince Zuko, the third daughter of Lord Tai of Yoakekuma.”

She managed to contain her smile for a moment, offering a delicate bow with a swish of her skirts and then bouncing back up. Her hair was a glossy black, with a hint of warmer browns, not unlike Zuko’s own, but she shared Yan Hui’s smoke-grey eyes, typical of their clan, as opposed to noble gold or amber.

“Many blessings, Prince Zuko.” She says somewhat more exuberantly than the words were really meant for.

For a moment, his tongue twists on his reply, because she has not said ‘ _May Agni bless you’_ for which he has already replied a thousand times with ‘ _May Agni bless us all’_ which has slowly turned from a polite missive into a weary plea, barely shy of a cry for help.

The longer he spends among the court, the more he fears for the survival of the spirit of his people, seeing more and more the glorious promise of some golden future for the poison it had produced.

“Many blessings, Lady Hana.” Zuko finally repeats back to her, for lack of anything more graceful to say.

“Father is very eager to welcome you back to the homeland, Prince Zuko.” She says, her smile beaming again. “We cast our prayers to the spirits for your safe return.”

“Thank you.” Zuko says softly, because he has heard that many times, but her eyes lack the shadow of calculation with which others have said it, and her voice lacks slyness as her expression lacks guile.

“May I borrow Ya-ya from you? It had been so long since we have heard from our cousin, and we were very surprised to see him here!” She inquires, practically on her toes. Zuko presses a smile down and nods, though Yan Hui’s dull grey eyes are staring at the far wall with something approaching resigned dread. There is something too indulgent about the set of his mouth to truly make his long-suffering expression fit his face.

She seems to stop herself just shy of actually assaulting Zuko’s person with a hug, but bounces away with enough gleeful energy that a breeze practically stirs in her wake, Yan Hui in tow. Zuko shakes his head a little. Nishi’s face gives away little, but her eyes dance, following the bright flashes of pink as they disappear into the milling clusters of people.

Zuko doesn’t socialize well, though he is making a terrible effort. Half of his problem is that he has no idea what some of these people are talking about, naming conflicts and scandals and intrigues he has been years and leagues away from, and half of his problem is that half of these people lie through their teeth to his face, and _he can tell_.

The lies of omission are harder to notice, because he doesn’t know what topics and names they’re treading around, because he’s completely out of the loop on the political climate, but Uncle lied by omission all the time, and he gets that feel for it sometimes.

Other times, they lie so poorly and boldly that he compares them to how well Azula lied as a child. Some of them lie as well as Azula did at age five. A few lie as well as she did at age nine. One of them couldn’t have out-lied Azula when Azula was _two_.

In her absence, he’s oddly grateful for his sister.

Surviving her taught him more than he could have expected about surviving everyone else.

“I’m sorry, New Ozai?” Zuko can’t bite back the question in time as he stares blatantly at one of the visiting governors, in conversation with a colonial general and one of the Fire Lord’s administrators, among a mingling of others.

“Named after your father, of course.” The general says shortly, as if _that_ were what Zuko didn’t understand. Zuko’s puzzlement short-circuits into a flat, dark-tempered glare typically reserved for Uncle’s missing Pi Sho tile and to his surprise, both the general and the governor shift backwards half a step, their flock of observers paling.

“Formerly Omashu, Prince Zuko.” His father’s administrator provides, showing far more tact and smoothly sweeping him into the circle of conversation. “Taken by force in the waning months of this past winter.”

Zuko nods gratefully, wrestling down his flare of temper as he processes that information. “And you…you renamed _Omashu_ …the _Sage City_ of Omashu…the oldest and most traditional domain in all the Earth Kingdoms…. _New Ozai_.” He tries very, very hard to keep the unbelievable level of derisive disbelief from his voice, which as a result comes out flat and cold. The governor and general look back at him as if they don’t quite understand the problem, the administrator has the good grace to look slightly away, at least acknowledging that perhaps there might be a problem, and over his shoulder, an elderly lord lifts his hand, pressing his fingers to his lips to hide a smirk at the foolishness.

“What idiot though of that?” Zuko blurted out, before he could think of a less abrasive way to make his point. “How many revolts have there been already? I imagine it’s the least pacified colony on this side of the Kolau Mountains.”

“Five revolts in two months, Prince Zuko.” Another general steps into the conversation, his beard iron grey and something oddly familiar about his face. “Including a successful exodus of most of the civilian population.”

“I do believe it was your sister who collaborated the change in designation.” The elderly lord replies as well, and the cluster of curious and otherwise engaged persons around them fell abruptly quiet.

Zuko’s nerves sing, expecting violence and chaos and twitching for the sword he isn’t carrying before he can forcibly remind himself that this isn’t that kind of fight. Not that it makes it any less dangerous.

He had to backtrack a moment to realize that he has retroactively implied his sister is an idiot. This has just become a matter of honor, and within his own clan, and that is tricky business, that is _deadly_ business. He does not want to set himself against Azula, not politically, not even personally. His father does that for him well enough already.

He does not want to create rival factions in court between himself and his sister when he is trying to create factions in the court between Iroh and Ozai. He is nowhere near good enough at this game to play on four sides of it. He’s not even convinced he’s good enough to play it at all, save that he has no choice.

Zuko takes a sharp breath in, trying not to panic.

“Where it any other city….” Zuko breathes out, still reaching for words. “We could roll out our red banners with certainty and decry our pride from the root of the earth to the height of the sky. But Omashu is not Taku, is not even Ba Sing Se. Omashu is _sacred_. It is where Guanyin first reached out to humanity and touched mortal spirits, binding them to the element of earth. We do not tear down temples and supplant them with foreign idols.” Zuko says firmly.

He didn’t used to understand that. Oh, he’d always _known_ the spirits existed, that they watched over them, as surely as he knew fire burned. He understood the customs and traditions that honored the powerful spirits and warded away evil ones. But sanctity? Reverence?

He was blessed by Agni, in blood and bending, and honored the gold dragon of the sun above all others, but he had not understood the humility of his existence until he had seen spirit-tales made real. Until he had watched a girl turn into moonlight, and a Great Spirit _personally_ slaughter his people by the hundreds.

It is not the place of mere mortals to violate sacred ground, nor dare to reach with their stained hands for divinity.

 “You may as well tell birds not to sing, for all the fealty it will get you.” Zuko shakes his head, and takes another sharp breath. “My sister is ambitious and proud, but at just fourteen, perhaps a little too eager. They will not see that renaming as a rightful change of rule so much as they will see it as an _insult_ , and injured pride can burn far longer and far hotter than the rage of disbelief in defeat.”

Zuko knows that too well.

“You would support their blatant defiance and dirty customs?”

Zuko glowers at the speaker, for their ignorance, for their arrogance. _We could burn the world down, if we didn’t mind choking on the ashes._ He thinks.

“Agni loves us, governor.” Zuko says simply. “Guanyin loves them. They are no more born to be succored by fire than we were born to be succored by earth.” Zuko sighs sharply, trying to make them understand, when most of them have never even seen anything outside the Fire Nation, never met someone who didn’t shape the flame when they bowed, who didn’t bless them by the sun when they met. “There is a balance. Our power comes from the sun, but our crops still sow in the ground. We might dare to bend the world.” Zuko can’t help but tense, praying he wasn’t spouting prophecy. “But we should also take care not to break it.”


	4. Chapter 4

“They broke it.” Sokka whispers, shaking where he stands. Moonlight makes his silhouette seem bigger somehow, and his ice-blue eyes, paler than his sister’s, shine silver. “They broke the wall.”

Hakoda’s children look _devastated_.

Katara doesn’t speak, having slid from the sky bisons back and stalked immediately to the rail of the ship, staring back the way they came, fists clenched tightly. His daughter doesn’t speak, but frost works its way across the wooden railing, and creeps over the deck around her feet. Snow glitters around her hair, the very water in the air freezing against her anger, and previously calm water churns around the vessel, sending tremors through the hull.

Hakoda’s heart aches.

His children have changed since he left them, so very very much.

As a father, he wants to reach out, smooth a hand over his sons hair and press a kiss to his brow, tell him he’s proud of him, wants to pull his daughter away from the cold, and wrap her in a warm embrace.

But Hakoda is not and never has been just a father. Something he found difficult when Kya died, and he had a whole village to help raise his children. He used to tell himself it would get easier with time, that his children would grow and it wouldn’t hurt so much. In some aspects that was true, but at this very moment, all he finds that to be is bitter.

At this moment, he cannot be just Sokka and Katara’s father.

He has to be his people’s chief.

“Come.” Hakoda says, drawing both of them in with his voice. “Tell me what you saw.”

Their report is almost clinical, sharp edged in its’ simple, troubling facts, save for the embellishments of anger, and Sokka’s occasional wild musing.

A drill. A mind-bendingly massive drill had punched through the wall of Ba Sing Se, driving clear for the heart of the city.

Sokka described the mechanisms and function, speculating on its power supply and weaknesses. Katara raged at the ugly scrawl it made, ruining green farmland in its wake.

“It didn’t reach the houses.” Katara shudders. “Thank Tui and La.”

“It was swallowed by the ground.” Sokka says, his expression thoughtful though his voice was flat. “There must have been nearly a hundred earthbenders, spread out like fence-posts, but they all moved like _one_ , exactly like one, and…the ground swallowed it.”

“But they still got through.” Katara mutters darkly. Sokka nods, jaw clenching, eyes glittering. “The Fire Nation Army still got through. They’re in the fields.”

“They’re burning them.”

The smoke wasn’t so great they could see it at night – the farmlands were barely sprouting after all, but Hakoda had tasted it on the air, waiting at the rail for his children to return. Reminding himself again and again that they would return, they had a sky bison, they were in the air, they couldn’t be reached there, couldn’t be hurt…

“They have enough troops to defend their foothold.” Sokka says, rattling off numbers and banners as best he had been able to tell in the dark. “But they don’t have a supply line established. They were trying to remain hidden until…” Sokka trails off, gritting his teeth and gesturing with his hands, but Katara outright hisses.

His children have changed.

Sokka was stronger, surer, more stoic….but less happy. He’d been easy to please, the boy Hakoda left behind. Quick to joke and quicker to laugh. Hakoda could have sighed, regretted and understood that innocence was often the first casualty of war, but…He’d only seen Sokka smile once, since his children had found them on the beach, _when_ his children had found them on the beach, and that smile had been stained with tears.

And Katara…She’d always been a brave little girl. Brave and kind and bone deep angry about what had been done to their people, to their waterbenders, to her mother. And while this teenager returned to him was fearless, was compassionate, she was also vengeful, and while no tribesman would begrudge any man or woman their vengeance against the fire nation, she was also so much more… _brittle_. Hard and sharp edged and so close to breaking to pieces.

 _We found the Avatar._ Katara had sobbed, throwing herself into her fathers arms after three years apart. _And we lost him._ Sokka had said, voice thin and defeated, eyes red-rimmed and watery over a shaky, sad smile. _Hi, dad._

Bato, Apaata, and grizzled old Sanguk, who should have been carving ivory totems for his grandchildren instead of sharpening spears, asked a few clarifying questions and then mulled over the information, proposing tentative plans on their speculation. Hakoda should have joined them, put his full attention onto the new and dire situation, but he couldn’t take his eyes off his son and daughter. They were made of shadow and silver in the dark of night, no lanterns on the deck for fear of being spotted by the Fire Navy’s scouts, and they were almost unrecognizable, like the snow-spirits in folk-tales, lost children haunting the ice-sheets.

 _They are not lost._ Hakoda thinks fiercely. _They are mine._

Sokka stared over the water, eyes narrowed, brooding over his thoughts, but Katara noticed his staring and her eyes flashed almost defiantly back at him. Hakoda looked away, too aware that some of her near ever-present anger was directed at him. He didn’t blame her. They had a right to be angry with him for leaving, no matter his reasons.

“Apaata,” Hakoda speaks, garnering the attention of the long-haired warrior, “get a report to the Earth Army, and the generals in Ba Sing Se. Bato, if you could prepare a map – we need to mark out the most likely places where they might attempt to establish supply lines, and where we can make that a very difficult proposition for them. We’ll start plotting courses at first light. For now…everyone should rest. It’s late, and we have long days ahead of us.”

His men nod and depart, Sanguk with somewhat less agility than his fellows.

Sokka looks away from the water and back towards his father, brows frowning slightly, eyes shaded with a hint of uncertainty that made him seem so much more like the fifteen-year-old that he was. He hesitates to leave, though it is late, and they are all tired. Hakoda lifts a brow in silent query.

“That’s….it?” Sokka questions haltingly. “Dad, they broke….they broke the wall!” His sons voice is quiet, but strained.

“They are not the first.” Hakoda says gently, though it is a cold comfort. “And there is little we can do, but what we can, _we are doing_.”

Sokka looks confused, and Katara looks up at him with a troubled expression. Hakoda sighs, and pushes his hair back with a hand, feeling the beads roll against his calloused palms. “What more is there?” He asks his children. “It will do no one well to weep and wring our hands. There will be a time for that, when all is lost. _But all is not lost_. Not yet.” Hakoda tells them firmly. “So yes, son. That’s it. We plan, we rest, we do what we can, when we can, and we pray it is enough.”

“But we’re not really doing anything!” Katara blurts out, loud and frustrated, her shoulders tense and taut. The vessel rocks slightly with a rogue swell of water. “We haven’t fought the Fire Nation at all since we got here!”

Hakoda frowns at his daughter, and resists the urge to cross his arms. She is not Kya, and this is not another old familiar argument over which was the best way to keep the fire going through the night.

“Katara.” Sokka says quietly, half an admonishment and half a whine.

“We just-we just watch-and-and set those stupid sinkers to tie up their propellers and send messages so that other people can do the fighting! How can we just sit here and let other people fight for us? We’re supposed to be warriors!” Katara rages, voice high and thready and young.

She’s _fourteen_ , he realizes. Fourteen and so far from home, where the other women would take her into the sweat lodge, where there would be bonfires and dancing and ceremonies only the women were privy to, to transition her from childhood and into womanhood.

Neither of his children were given the coming-of-age they were due, he recognizes, and swallows the pain of it. He wasn’t there, when his children grew up, and he’d never meant for that to happen.

Hakoda puts his hands on her shoulders and lowers his head solemnly. “Katara.” He says softly, and she quiets, though her eyes still swim with emotion. “How many men did I leave home with?” He asks her quietly, voice full of old grief. “A warrior knows when he must face his enemy, yes, but that is not all a warrior can do. If I take these men into battle, into a full assault on the Fire Nation Navy, we will lose. That is not failure. That is only….what it is. To not face them, to fight in other ways…it is not cowardice, Katara. It is survival. And we must survive, daughter mine. We are all that is left of our people. We _must_ survive.” He cups her cheek, finding her the most precious thing in the world. More sacred than warmth and moonlight and his own life. A waterbender of the Southern Tribe, proof that his people would not break and be destroyed.

“I know that.” Katara says almost petulantly, and then drops her gaze, repeating it more softly. “I _know_ that.” Her voice is an apology.

Hakoda smiles somewhat ruefully. She came into this world a fighter, Kya always used to tell him. Sokka had been a joyful baby, if fussy, but Katara, when she hadn’t been wide-eyed calm, had been a terrific screamer.

He pulls her into a hug, and Sokka too. His son grumbles a little, but squeezes back just as tightly. They are gangly-limbed and warm-bodied, smelling of sea-salt, animal hair and the ginger-mint oil Healer Kanook used by the pint, and he loves them dearly.

 _The Fire Nation has broken the wall of Ba Sing Se._ His heart trembles fearfully. _We are doing what we can. And we are losing._


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The more I write, the more complicated this story gets. I mean, as an author. I'm sinking deeper and deeper into this story, plot lines within plot lines keep popping up. The first book was so simple... you can't see it all yet, because i'm only dropping hints in the actual writing of all the background that's sitting in my head, but wow...i think...this is going to be a long haul. Possibly going to become three parts. maybe.

“Governor Toro.” Master Sergeant Hisao murmurs quietly, giving Zuko fair warning to stop glaring at the floors as he walked and look up for a polite greeting.

A polite greeting that the Governor managed to turn into a half-hour long conversation that somehow ended with Zuko promising to make time to be introduced to his eldest daughter, the agreement coming out of his mouth as he was still distracted by the tidbit of information about the spring storm season diverting supplies from the colonies. It was only as he was walking away that Zuko realized how tactfully he’d been trapped by the overly effusive governor and groaned.

Toro was one of many among the court in recent days who had shown great interest in introducing Zuko to a daughter, or a niece, or a younger sister, all of them assuredly beautiful and sweet-tempered.

That many of those introductions also came with an emphasis on how many notable ancestors their lineages _shared in common_ was more than a little alarming. Perhaps he had been too young before his banishment to recognize it, but there was an alarming rise in sentiment regarding ‘pure’ Fire-born bloodlines.

Repressing a shudder at the memory of having had a close cousin all but bodily shoved at his person, her resemblance close enough to Azula’s to be mistaken for an older version of his younger sister at a glance, Zuko made a small gesture with the copper sleeve of his silk robe and slipped quickly into a discreet passage behind a tapestry. Hisao followed in his wake, moving with surprising subtlety for a man of his height and build.

Zuko had quickly been reacquainted with the hidden passages that riddled the palace upon his return, glad to have somewhere to hide when the politics and polite socialization became too much for his stressed nerves and treasonous mind.

The route down to the avatars prison was easily navigated, traversed several times a day, even in the near pitch-black of the hidden passages. He could light fire in his palm to guide his way, but sometimes he missed the skulking he’d done during his banishment, and this was as close as he could get to sneaking down foreign back-alleys or into enemy strongholds.

The guards on duty, not his own, snapped to attention when he approached, tense and uneasy as he gave them a sharp, flat look, passing through the reinforced door between them.

Aang was sitting somewhat listlessly against the fountain when Zuko and Hisao entered, tapping his fingers along the ledge, watching the water bubble. He perked up when Zuko walked towards the bars, catching his attention, and bounced to his feet.

“Zuko!” He cheered, dust kicking up behind his feet as he raced towards the bars, nearly slaming into them in his eagerness. “You came today!”

Zuko winced internally. He did feel bad about not visiting yesterday, but he’d been in another long meeting regarding the siege of Ba Sing Se.

The second Siege of Ba Sing Se.

Spirits, Zuko didn’t know whether to be proud, horrified of, or scared for his sister. No matter how brilliant or powerful, she was only fourteen, and Fire Lord Ozai, encouraged by her command at the breaking of the wall, had tasked her with finally bringing the impenetrable city to heel.

Even in the War Room, the _or else_ of his command had been evident in his fathers’ voice, making Zuko think terribly of Lu Ten, and swallow back either tears, or a snarl.

His reverence for his father, his terrible awe, faded day by day, as Zuko immersed himself into the brutal facts and machinations behind the ongoing war effort. The anger that replaced it, the spite and ease of betrayal that came with it, terrified him at times. Caution and dumb luck were the only things that would keep him alive. Zuko was rarely lucky, and it was damn hard to be cautious when his rage was so thick he was a heartbeat from unleashing uncontrolled flames.

“I have something for you.” Zuko says, in place of an apology, because there were only so many things he could apologize for without doing little else in a day. Aang beams, bouncing on his toes, and Zuko passes over a small bundle of scrolls, plucked from one of the many caches the Fire Sages kept, which had been appropriated from raiding the libraries of conquered territories. Zuko had supplied Aang with history scrolls and popular poetry tomes among a few other pieces of literature he remembered having been set to study when he was Aang’s age, but these were something else entirely. These Zuko had selected personally, thinking both of the Avatar’s role in the world, and of Aang, a twelve-year old boy. They were spirit-tales and folk-lore, from each of the four nations. Even the Air Nomads.

Zuko had been shaken to the core, and nearly wept in devastated relief, when he realized that they hadn’t burned _everything_.

Maybe, he hoped, just maybe, that would help with his nightmares.

“Oh wow.” Aang breathed out, his voice soft and careful, the sheer _force_ of his excitement dimming into a gentle pleasure. Zuko’s lips quirked in half a smile, and Aang lowered himself to a nearby cushion on the floor, while Zuko moved to do the same, a small writing desk having been placed on this side of the bars for his own purpose. He liked to come down here to offer the airbender company, but he was by no means released from his duties to do so.

Normally, Zuko’s guards would either retreat back to the doors to stand watch, or else leave to carry out their own business, but Hisao preferred to move along the bars to where they met the cavern wall, settle his back against it, and meditate.

In the past, Zuko has always found being near other meditating Firebenders to be irritating, as nearby flames flickered to the other benders rhythm, discordant with the pulse within Zuko himself. But Master Sergeant Hisao, a big, grizzled Firebender, had a deceptively gentle presence, and his chi did not flare and fade in short static bursts, but swelled and flowed away in a more soothing, constant current of energy, which was not nearly so abrasive to Zuko’s senses.

Even Uncle Iroh, whose command of his inner fire was utterly precise and calmly maneuvered, while comfortably familiar, was not so easily embraced.

The air in the chamber, always a little too chill on Aang’s lesser lit side, warmed pleasantly, and the torchlight rolled like a wave, rising and falling to the inhale and exhale, to the pull and release, of Hisao’s meditative breathing exercises.

Aang unrolled several scrolls, neatly lining them up around his cushion, and Zuko settled at the desk, pulling a packet of messages and reports from where he’d tucked them in his belt. He glanced briefly at the map laid out on one side of the desk, taking a moment to move tacks and ribbons to match the latest reports and decisions made by the War Council. Red markers where slowly converging on Ba Sing Se, and Zuko rubbed his palms against his thighs nervously.

If the Earth Kingdom fell….

 _If the Fire Nation won…the war_ would _be over._ A quiet, conflicted voice murmured in his mind. _It would end. No more pointless sacrifices, no need to burn everything when the comet came…_

Zuko glanced at Aang, who had flopped on his stomach, feet kicking breezes in the air, chin propped on his hands, eyes wide and engrossed with a colorfully illuminated scroll, the last airbender. Absently, Zuko reaches up until his fingers brush the rippled scar on his face, smooth and unyielding under calloused fingertips.

 _So very little about what my father does has ever been about **need**. _ He reminds himself, even if the reminder is the reminder of pain, and brings the phantom sensation of his burning to his skin, making his fists clench, his knuckles tighten whitely, and his teeth grind. It’s the memory of his mother disappearing in the night, of his sister throwing lightning, a desperate fury on her young face, and the last southern waterbender looking at him with blinding, tear-filled hatred.

The last southern waterbender, a prodigy no different from his own sister, who had to cross the world just to figure out how to use the power she was born to wield. The last airbender, twirling innocent breezes in a cell built by the people who had destroyed his home.

His thoughts, darker and darker, wander to Zhao, and the blood-red moon, and the near annihilation of another element in an already unbalanced world. They wander to Ba Sing Se, where one report had mentioned that they were burning the fledgling fields…

 _Just ending the war,_ he realizes bleakly, tiredly _, will not be enough._


	6. Chapter 6

“Azula?” Ty Lee calls softly, her smoke grey eyes round with concern as she ducks nimbly through the drapes at the entrance of the command tent.

Azula is standing behind a large table, with a detailed map spread out across it, littered with markers and assemble reports for this quadrant of the Earth Kingdom, and the sea-routes along which they were attempting to establish their supply lines. Their supply lines, which had been harried and intercepted no matter which paths they took, and had been there-for infrequent and often arrived in a state of spoil or disrepair from attack damage and delay.

Her gaze is pointed at the map, but she’s not really looking at it. Her eyes are fixated, burning wells of amber, focused so far beyond the room that they were glassy and blind. The missive from her father is splayed just beyond her left hand, the words etched into her minds’ eye, branded against her soul.

… _better yourself through experience, as the failed general Iroh was meant to do….succeed in a task nearly as worthy as your elder brother has accomplished….expect nothing less than glory from an heir of my lineage, should it not prove too difficult….do my name proud, as you are meant to_ …

Azula can feel her own heart pound, can see Ty Lee shiver a little, as the princess draws all the heat in the room towards her own frozen spirit, the ghost of fire flickering around her skin.

She doesn’t understand why she has failed, but disappointment and scorn drip from her fathers’ words, even pressed neatly into paper.

_I expect your return to court upon your victory._

The parting line makes her heart stutter, and her chi flare wildly. She isn’t panicking. Azula _does not_ panic. However…

Her stomach burns, and her palms sweat, her rough-trimmed fingernails digging into her skin. She needs to scream, or kill her enemies, or set the sky on fire. This is unacceptable….this, this… _hurts_. Why does it hurt?

 _It is a test._ She tells herself, teeth-grittingly certain _. A trial. Her father loves her, above all others. He is only giving her the chance to prove herself._

 _Upon your victory._ It wasn’t a punishment. It wasn’t. Merely…expectation, merely fact. This was nothing like her foolish brothers banishment, it wasn’t. Father knew she would win. Father had faith in her, and she would not prove him wrong. She would be victorious. She would be swift and decisive and return home with honor.

“Azula?” Ty Lee repeats.

“What?” Azula snaps, her fingers digging into the tabletop, charring the wood where they touched, her hands scorching hot. Ty Lee blinks forcibly, her version of a flinch, and then visibly brightens, as if she could force others to be happy through infectious cheer. Ty Lee bounces forward and lifts herself onto the tabletop, passing something towards Azula with both hands and a bubbly smile.

“I have something for you!” She says, sing-song. Even Ty Lee looks tired. Dark smudges under grey eyes, and her braid fraying. Dust stains the dawn-cloud pink of her clothes, and even her sweet voice rasps from the smoky air.

Azula takes the cloth-bound parcel curiously, as Ty Lee continues. “I received it from my cousin Yan Hui. He’s been promoted! It’s wonderful!” Ty Lee gushes. “He’s been made a member of the Royal Guard for your brother, Prince Zuko! Just like me! Isn’t that neat?”

Azula gives her friend a narrow, somewhat disgruntled glance at that, at the thought of Zuko having a private guard. Then reconsiders. It’s…a little funny, actually, imagining Zuko being trailed after by a masculine version of Ty Lee. He’d always been so amusingly overwhelmed by her when they were younger, bewildered in the face of her almost oppressive cheer.

Ty Lee didn’t wear the uniform, her sudden assignment as a personal guard to Princess Azula more technical than official. A tedious necessity, but the only way to keep Ty Lee, who was otherwise a civilian, by her side. A trick which had not worked with Mai, whom, as a governor’s daughter, was not so easily drafted, not even for Azula. Not for true warfare.

Mai had been ordered to leave the battlefield.

Azula grits her teeth and glances aside at the crimson walls of the command tent. She wasn’t so childish as to… _miss_ the dour girls company, but she did regret the loss of her cold wit and calculating advice.

Azula catches a whiff of singed fabric and takes a slow, smooth breath, calming her chi, and releasing the almost-fire burning in her fingers. She loosens the tie and unravels the cloth wrapping to reveal a sealed message scroll and a familiar sheathed blade.

The leather and ivory sheath, the green enamel and brass pommel fit more easily into her hand now than it did when she was eight. She frees the blade with a glossy hiss, the blue steel wicked-edged and brilliantly polished.

_Never give up without a fight._

The engraving stood out brightly, even in the reflection of candlelight. Azula pursed her lips. Now her curiosity was truly peaked, and she hummed thoughtfully, picking up the scroll and wondering just what her brother thought he was up to. Sending her treasured keepsakes and secreted messages?

The seal in the wax was equally baffling – crossed dao inside the sacred flame – but she cracked it nonetheless and unrolled the fine paper.

It was written in code, of course, but one easily recognized – they had developed it together in their elocution and literacy lessons, a reward from their tutor for their studious attention. Properly keyed, the message read easily in her brothers’ enviable penmanship.

For all that he was a terrible speaker, Zuko had always had far superior penmanship and brushwork, much to her annoyance.

_To my sister,_

_I know a knife may seem a silly thing to give to the best firebender in the world, but I believe you should have it all the same. It saw me through my struggles, and I find comfort in the idea that it will see you through yours. Obviously, I expect you to give it back one day._

_Is that too sentimental?_

_Forgive me, Azula, but I find myself to be far fonder of you now that there is half a world between us._

_It is probably equally silly to confess that I fear for you. I do not doubt your skill, will, or eventual success. You are the superior combatant, after all_

_I fear –_

_Spirits, I am not certain I can find the words to convey what it is I fear for you. That you fight over the killing fields that claimed Lu Ten? That you fight to change the balance of the world at just fourteen, when even the avatar is given more years of peace than that?_

_But those fears are weaknesses, and you probably care nothing for them._

_Very well. I shall share with you a different fear, one I hope you might at least understand the cause for. I fear your ambition will outweigh your oversight. That your pride and prowess will overcome your eventual success. I do not doubt father has ordered you to claim that city or crush it, no matter what cost. It is to be expected. I have reports that you are burning the fields. There is nothing to be done for it now, of course, but it is spring. The fields can still be re-sown for the season. Do you understand why they should be?_

_I await the glorious future we promised the world, sister mine. My blessings to Agni, and Agni’s to you._

_Zuko_.

Azula frowns at the letter, eyes narrowed, utterly baffled. Just what was Zuko playing at? And what exactly did he mean by asking her if she understood, understood…

What in the world did he care about the fields? The field were _in the way_.

The fields were…

Azula scowled and looked over the map. Ba Sing Se was massive, nearly a quarter of the continent taken up by the sprawling city, which reigned over the entire region. Which… _supported_ the entire region.

 _I await the glorious future_ …

Azula snorted, wondering if Zuko assumed he was being clever, playing word games. Maybe he was _bored_. He was, as ever, concerned about those dirty, ignoble peasants she intended to grind under her heel. Oh, he wasn’t entirely wrong – destabilizing the economy of a region they intended to rule wasn’t particularly good planning, but burning the fields was doing the job of keeping the Earth Army at bay.

“Something funny?” Ty Lee inquired hopefully.

“Brother, trying to be….brotherly.” Azula sneers, feeling a laugh coil in her belly at the thought. Still, something else about the letter…

Azula skimmed the lines again.

 _The best firebender in the world_.

Flattering.

Her smiles thins and her gaze narrows.

Zuko didn’t know _how_ to be flattering. If he hadn't been able to learn the art after thirteen years in the court, he certainly wouldn't have learned it during his three years at sea. Oh, he could be complimentary. He could be polite. He could be perfectly honest in a manner which conveyed flattery, but…

If he said it, he believed it.

 _The best firebender in the world_.

The words toyed with her, teasing and prodding some hint of danger, some subtle omen of intrigue. It shouldn’t, it was probably nonsense. It was from _Zuko_ , after all.

 _The best firebender in the world_.

She liked the way it read, the warmth it brought to her bones, when minutes before she’d felt so bitterly ice-cold.

_Best firebender…_

_…In the world_.

Azula stops breathing.

 _Oh_.


	7. Chapter 7

Sending the letter had been stupid and dangerous. Zuko had agonized over sending it, over sending anything, to Azula. He’d meditated on it, he’d pulled his hair out thinking about it, he’d burned drafts upon drafts of the letter just to burn off some of his nerves (not that it worked) and yet…

And yet…

He’d _had_ to.

Azula was vicious even when she was happy. She was cruel. She was a deadly threat – to him, to his people, to the _world_.

She was the embodiment of Sozin’s legacy.

She had the birthright, intelligence and the sheer incredible talent to one day lay everything Ozai desired at his feet.

And yet…

She was still Zuko’s sister.

If he could – if there was even a chance he could come out of this _disaster_ waiting to happen without – without losing his sister, without having her _hate_ him…

He had to take it. He had to try.

Most of their lives, they had been bitter rivals – for lessons, for firebending, for their parents approval – but they were also….there were hidden snatches of time, flicker and gone moments, secret and treasured and ignored, where he and his sister had been the only people in the world to understand each other _perfectly_.

So he had to try.

Even if he then had to suffer the consequences, walking around the imperial palace on the edge of panic. Waiting to discover that he had made a terrible, lethal mistake. He’d given his sister just enough hints to get himself killed, if she handed it over to their father.

But that was exactly the reason he thought she wouldn’t.  He thought she’d enjoy the leverage too much to actually use it. He hoped.

Spirits. At this point he almost _needed_ for something to go wrong. It would feel more…. _right_. As soon as he thinks that, of course, he curses himself, because the spirits always love irony, and tenses up more.

Kotone, recently promoted to captain, and there-in designated the captain of his personal guard, walks two paces behind him, and he can feel her amber eyes watching his back, her boots clipping sharply against the floor. His nerves, he can tell, are getting on _her_ nerves.

“Prince Zuko.”

He whirls, sparks flinging off his fingertips, even as the voice registers, as recognition kicks in and a strange relief sags through him.

“Lord Piandao.” Zuko greets, feeling the tense lines of his mouth ease a little. Piandao is dressed in a long, near-black tunic, trimmed in noble gold, but there is a shimmer woven into the dark fabric, subtle, but distracting to Zuko’s eyes, as they were used to discerning shades of shadow when he skulked about. It took a moment to recognize the pattern for what it was – snarling mongoose-dragons, all flashes of teeth and claws.

He has not come to court with even the pretense that he might play nice, Zuko notes, wanting to smirk.

The feeling dissipates as Piandao gives him one of those bland, cutting looks – a quick battlefield assessment, as if expecting that the time since they last saw one another may have diminished Zuko in some fashion. It’s a look that makes him bristle, but then Lord Piandao nods shortly, grey gaze flicking back up with some hint of satisfaction. Zuko eyes him back with sharp wariness.

“Forgive my abruptness, Prince Zuko, but may I make a request upon your time? A guest has followed me a long way in the hopes that I might convince you to meet.” Piandao says, with all due curt formality, though any other noble would likely find it terribly rude. It was abrupt, and not made through traditional intermediaries. But Zuko, like Piandao, does not appreciate the time, and its waste, that such measures take. “I would consider it….” Piandao lows tone is casual, is every measure the voice you expect of a lord, and so tacitly delivered that you almost might not notice that he stopped in the middle of his sentence. It doesn’t feel like the hesitation that it is.

Zuko prays to Agni that he might one day command even half as dignified a presence as Shu Jing’s lord.

There is a moment, where Zuko’s thoughts and Piandao’s likely mirror each others. There are simply things it does not do for a lord to say. To call it a favor would imply a debt. To call it a kindness would imply pity, and no lord should be found pitiful. To even call it an honor when he has made a request and not merely offered an invitation would imply a fealty, and while Zuko was the crown prince, he was much younger and did not yet hold the throne – it would be politically…embarrassing, for a lord of Piandao’s standing to do such a thing while at Ozai’s court. Captain Kotone shifts slightly in Zuko’s shadow, as the heartbeat of silence drags on, too aware that they are not alone in the corridor.

“Consider it nothing.” Zuko finds himself saying, as his stomach lurches and he makes a daring move. “I would consider it a pleasure to entertain the guest of a friend.”

Piandao is too well versed to show surprise, though others around them display shock, and then share whispers. Piandao just dips his head slightly, an invitation to lead the way, his stride long and his back ram-rod straight.

Zuko really hopes he didn’t just lose an ally by trying to claim him one. They do not speak as they move through the palace, not to each other. Piandao greets Kotone pleasantly, offering her a brief report on her family and the goings-on of Shu Jing. Governor Toro’s daughter and her retinue greet Zuko shyly in the hall, but move past without much dithering. No matter her father’s ambitions, the awkward, round-faced girl had as little interest in marrying the prince as he had in marrying her. Lord Tai of Youkekuma passes amidst a veritable cloud of pages, administrators, and cheery-faced young relations. He greets them both, his eyes flickering back and forth between them almost fearfully before he and Piandao share a tight smile. It isn’t impossible that they might know each other, Zuko is aware. It is just, well – Shu Jing and Youkekuma are about as far apart as they can get without leaving the Fire Islands – and given their respective industries, share little trade.

That they both immediately glance towards him, after sharing that tight smile, makes Zuko give them both a narrow look. A scribe at lord Tai’s elbow stutters a bit and shifts behind the nearest administrator. Tai bows, his long greying hair trailing down, his pale grey eyes dropping respectfully, and they move on their way.

An elderly courtier holds them up longer than Zuko had expected, though he grows more patient as he grows more amused, discovering that she is attempting to convince the lord of Shu Jing that he simply must allow himself to be introduced to her lovely, widowed niece. Zuko, it seems, isn’t the only one who had to scan his paperwork in order to determine that a marriage contract hasn’t been slipped in amongst the rest.

His father seems content to allow Zuko to immerse himself in the court as Ozai himself had done, but though political intrigue is currently what his life depends on, Zuko has found himself far too idle when he isn’t trying to suss out loyalties, sow rumors, and change the opinions in hearts and minds. He can’t talk all hours of the day, and so he’s taken on other tasks to attend to, mainly in a supervisory capacity, though he does more observing and learning than actual managing, and signing off on compiled intelligence reports when his father would rather not deal with such matters.

Zuko isn’t sure if it’s a test or if it is merely that his father has other things on his mind. He knows there is a large, classified military project that reports directly to Ozai, he knows that there are Imperial Fire Sages quietly meeting with noble families who come from certain, powerful lineages, who whisper in his father’s ear, he knows that there are plans in the works that he knows nothing about, and he worries.

Piandao leads Zuko out in one of the more secluded, private gardens, the ones carefully maintained for just this purpose – discreet meetings between dignitaries. He follows a path under ornate trees to a gazebo, able to smell the sweet-cakes before it comes into view, and orders Kotone to wait behind. The sheer drapes are drawn down, obscuring the occupants inside.

When lord Piandao steps inside and bows deeply, Zuko expects to find a High Sage, or the lord of a greater domain, or even his Great Aunts, such was the respect the lord of Shu Jing offered.

But Zuko does not recognize the elderly man before him. The elder had blunt, crumbling features, as though carved from breaking stone, and skin the color of fine dust. His age-whitened hair was long, pulled back in a high tail, a few strands clinging stubbornly to their previous dark color. Bags drooped heavily from his eyes, and his broad hands, calloused and tough, shook a little even as he sat, iron backed and proud. His robes were dark and simple – burgundy and black. Three things stood out in sharp relief to Zuko’s eye and high-strung nerves; the unusually fierce glitter in wise olive eyes, the brilliant green dragon-scale which was strung from a cord around the elders neck, and the archaic, half-sun adornment in his hair, a gleaming match to the one Master Sergeant Hisao wore.

“Prince Zuko, son of Ursa and Firelord Ozai, may I introduce you to Kuzon of Anbawan, the dragonrider.” Piandao says boldly.

Zuko’s mouth goes dry.

Kuzon’s reputation proceeds him. Currently, the old, _old_ elder was the commander of the Home Guard, a position awarded to him by Fire Lord Azulon. When Azulon had begun the tradition of dragon-hunting, he had ordered the order of dragon-riders to turn on their own. And Kuzon _had_ – he had slain his own dragon, and presented Fire Lord Azulon with her wings as a _trophy_.

Kuzon of Anbawan, the _last_ dragonrider.

Zuko cuts a sharp gaze to Piandao, that thought sticking. He’s played too often with words of late to have missed the one left out. And, and…

 _Kuzon_.

He knows that name for another reason.

Zuko cuts his sharp gaze back to the old man, the very, _very_ old man, suspicion sinking into his bones. The young man takes a dragging step forward, uncertain to whether he should be eager – finally, finally he felt like something was happening, like maybe he was actually getting somewhere, maybe – or filled with dread. He’d leapt off the cliffs at Ember Island as a child, and it had felt like this too – will the warm water catch me? Or will the drop land me bloody on the rocks?

Zuko sinks down across the low tea table, those deep olive eyes watching him, unmoved. Zuko takes a slow, even breath – he could laugh, when he feels his chi warm his body, because he is as outclassed by the dragonrider as a firebender as he is by lord Piandao as a swordsman. Everyone knows that those who learned fire from the dragons learned it best.

Zuko swallows hysteria, swallows dread, swallows uncertainty. He has a duty to his people, and he can plan and plan and plan and get nowhere, or he can _act_.

 _You have a duty to your people_. He resolves himself. _You know what they say about plans anyway_.

“I want to ask you, elder, if a very long time ago…” Zuko swallows again, meeting that unfathomable gaze. Takes another breath. You could survive the end of the world if you just kept breathing. “If a lifetime ago, you knew a boy called Aang.”


	8. Chapter 8

The _only_ reason Toph doesn’t throw herself on the ground when they dock is because there isn’t actually any ground to throw herself on.

She _hates_ ships.

She’d been sick the entire time across the ocean. Sick and _blind_. Spirits, she hasn’t felt that helpless since she was five! Since before she’d found the badger-moles, and learned what _real_ earthbending could do.

Although, even though she had been sick (horribly, grossly sick, ugh!) and she couldn’t use her earth-sense to see, she still feels like maybe she learned something, clinging to the metal deck. Every tutor she’d ever had said no-one could bend metal, but…her cheek pressed against the plating, her body fully relaxed into it, in those precious few moments when her head wasn’t spinning and her stomach wasn’t doing flip flops, she could have sworn that she could _feel_ it.

And if she could feel it, in the way she thought she could… _oh man._

She had to try!

When she wasn’t, you know, on a rocking tin can in the middle of a huge body of water.

“Miss Toph!” Iroh called out, catching up to her with more ease than a man his age ought to have. “I am terribly sorry you did not enjoy our journey. I am glad to see you seem to be feeling better.” He says sincerely, and Toph does _not_ blush over his caring dotage.

“Yeah yeah.” She drawls, not feeling a tickle in her throat at all. “Don’t sweat about it, Unc- uh, Master Iroh.” Toph corrects herself, remembering their cover story. They were actually _in the Fire Nation_ now. She couldn’t afford to slip up. She heaves in a deep breath, clasps her hands together, feeling the polished ceramic bangles click together (clay, she could bend) and bowed, the tassels in her hair from the new copper hair-piece tickling her ears.

Here, she wasn’t Toph, the Blind Bandit, The Greatest Earthbender in the World. Here, she needed to be Toph _Beifong_ , of the Beifong Clan, the daughter of a powerful merchant. _From the Fire Nation Colonies_ , of course. Whose parents had entrusted General Iroh with her safety, entreating upon him to sponsor her and introduce her to the Fire Nation Royal court, in the hopes of making a good match, and building stronger relationships between the Colonies and the Homeland, blah, blah, blah.

All she really had to do was play well-mannered little blind high-born girl (with some _small_ earthbending ability), stick to Iroh like a burr-bramble, and figure out a way to rescue the Avatar from the Fire Lord, _without_ getting themselves executed.

Right.

Toph gets lifted onto a palanquin, biting her lip so as not to bite the guardsman who lifted her up, and doesn’t get to touch actual dirt until they’re outside the palace. All she has to go on is the scents of food stalls and spring greenery, of people packed together, dust, the tang of Sulphur, and the sounds of creaking carts and rippling awnings and tramping feet and deals being made in the market. Iroh is surprisingly capable of describing things in a way she can understand – red tiles like warm clay, bright paper lanterns the visual equivalent of running through a field of grass, and feeling wildflowers kiss your fingertips. No one has ever really tried to help Toph understand how they can see the world before, or at least, no one succeeded quite as well as Iroh has. He just _knows_ , somehow, how to come at things from a different perspective.

The servants back home had described some colors as warm or cold, or as having the feeling of a seaon; like spring of winter, to them, but even Toph’s own mother hadn’t truly figured out how to bridge the gap. Lady Beifong would stand by Toph, feeling sad when she watched her daughter cup a rose in her hands, and apologise.

 _It’s not your fault, mama._ Toph would tell her, always. Her mother never felt like she believed her.

Even in slippers, when Toph’s feet touch the ground, she almost moans in relief, the world suddenly cast into existence around her. She wiggles her toes, curious about the crackly, and sometimes airy feel of the rock – some of it like glass, and some of it almost like _soap_. Weird. But the bones are as solid as old Omashu, down where they reach into the ocean floor – solid granite and deep-rooted iron, layered with obsidian and pumice and coral, before it blurs into sand and water and she can’t quite feel the edges of it anymore. She can feel the slow pressure of moving magma, but it’s difficult to grasp with her senses, and Toph doesn’t really try. This entire city rests in a dormant caldera. She doesn’t want to poke anything too hard.

She’s not _dumb_.

Toph follows demurely in Iroh’s shadow as they enter the palace, gritting her teeth at the wooden floors and beams. There is just enough stone in the foundations and support structure to get a feel for the building, but nowhere near as accurately as she could have in an Earth Kingdom palace. She’ll have to rely more on her acute hearing, traipsing around this place. Darn.

“General Iroh, we are honored to receive you.” Someone bows a greeting, and Toph bows when Iroh does, keeping her gaze cast down. She may be blind, but her etiquette tutor always told her it was impolite, the way she always seemed to be staring at the ceiling when she spoke with someone. Down was better, they said. It was…ladylike.

“It is good to be home after such a long journey.” Iroh chuckles. “I trust my brother is well?”

There is a quiet, nervous shifting, among the people Toph can feel standing around them, before the other guy responds. “The Fire Lord is very well. He has asked that you join him after breakfast tomorrow, that he may greet you himself.”

 _After_ breakfast, Toph notes. _Tomorrow_.

She’d listened through enough walls while her parents did business to understand exactly how much of a slight that was. Clearly, Iroh did not have the Fire Lords favor. Which, she knew already. But sheesh, public discord among the family?

That was poor politics.

Not one of the Beifong trade partners had ever had even a clue as to how viciously Toph’s father and uncle argued over business.

 _We must appear as solid as the wall of Ba Sing Se_. Her father said once, over dinner. _If our competetitors believe there is a weakness, and they will find it, like a fault in stone, and seek to exploit it, until we shatter from within_.

He’d used that same argument when trying to explain why they hid their blind daughter from the world. Like she was a flaw in the foundation of their house.

“I see.” Iroh rumbled quietly. “I look forward to it!” He added brightly afterwards, as affable as he had been when bartering their passage with a truly cantankerous captain. “Thank you, Master Sage.”

The Sage and his retinue murmur their affirmation and depart. Iroh’s stance immediately shifts, a subtle rebalancing of weight and posture. Toph has to focus to feel the pressure of his bones, the rigidity of his spine, and the tilt of his head, looking up into the palace with all the tactical evaluation of a battlefield general.

“Come, Miss Toph.” He says quietly, his voice cool and low, like banked embers. “Let us find my nephew.”

“Yes, Master Iroh.” Toph says primly, wary of any listening ears.

Which is apparently much easier said than done. Iroh asks a servant, who sends him towards the gardens, where they end up tracking down a guard, who suggests they try the assembly hall, where they run into way too many nobles and politicians, eager to try and curry favor or express their scorn with the retired General Iroh. Many who inquire curiously (or suspiciously) after Toph, who smiles sweetly and murmurs her responses towards the floor and walks with the kind of grace that makes rich girls jealous and noble girls nervous.

Toph had been born blind. Her parents had been determined to make her perfect in every other way.

Another Fire Sage, after Iroh begs out of yet another conversation, informs them that Prince Zuko has spent much of his time in the training grounds, when he is not at court.

Iroh seems very uneasy, about all that time Prince Zuko is rumored to spend at court.

The instructor at the training grounds informs them that he hasn’t seen Prince Zuko since dawn.

“I miss the days when he was confined to the ship.” Iroh grumbles, then sighs ruefully. “Not that he ever made himself _easy_ to track down.”

Since Toph just spent two weeks (awful, horrid, nauseated weeks) on a ship with Iroh, she has a pretty good idea of exactly how valiantly a teenage boy might have tried to hide. Iroh meant well. The problem was that Iroh meant well _all the time_. Every minute of every day. Unceasingly.

At least Toph was a girl. There was some places she could go, or claim to go, where Iroh just was _not_ gonna follow.

They meet a scribe back at the palace who mentions that Prince Zuko will sometimes spend the evening in the Imperial Library, and they try there just for kicks, because it’s not even midday yet. To absolutely no surprise, the prince isn’t there either.

“The palace isn’t _that_ big.” Iroh mutters, and Toph can hear his whiskers bristle as he smooths his beard, thinking.

“My lord Iroh?” A woman calls out, and Toph can feel Iroh’s countenance brighten as he turns, like his energy somehow…burns a little more, but not like anger does. Just…warmer. The woman stops short of them, her heels clicking together. She’s got really good balance, and Toph is fairly certain she’s wearing light armor.

“Ah, captain?” Iroh greets.

“Captain Kotone, sir, of Prince Zuko’s personal guard. I heard that you were searching for the Prince, my lord.” She says, voice a little lower for a woman than Toph was used to, but Fire Nation voices always had a bit of a rasp. Too much smoke, Toph thinks.

“Yes!” Iroh says, almost booming. “Difficult to find, my nephew can be!” He chuckles.

Captain Kotone neither confirms nor denies. She’s actually pretty hard for Toph to get a read on. “If your wish, lord Iroh, I can escort you to the crown prince?” She inquires respectfully.

“I would be most pleased, captain!” Iroh says warmly. The captain nods, and Toph can feel the woman look down towards her, feel her frown and her curiosity before it slips away like smoke. “If I may ask, where has my nephew been hiding himself?”

“The crown prince is not hiding, sir.” Kotone says, without a single inflection in her tone. Huh. “He is interrogating the avatar.”

Iroh doesn’t miss a step, but Toph can feel his heart jump and his muscles clench slightly. “I see.” He says, his voice lower. Flatter.

Except…Toph isn’t sure he does. If Kotone’s as hard to read for people with eyes as she is for Toph (and Toph is usually a lot better at reading people than people who can actually _read_ ) maybe he couldn’t tell, but there was something just a little off, when Kotone said _interrogating_. Like it isn’t what she meant.

Toph turns that over in her mind, hoping she’s right, because if she isn’t…her stomach clenches and her hands feel cold, and she is deliberately _not_ thinking about it.

Not thinking about it, and not thinking about yanking the volcano up by its roots if, if…

She’s _not_ thinking about it.

She’s an earthbender. She’s the greatest earthbender in the world. She can out-stubborn _herself_ , if she needs to.

The captain leads them underground. Pretty deep underground, actually, and Toph traces the lava tubes with her senses, and the winding warren of tunnels interspersed with steel that thread though them. Man, she thought it was hot _outside_. Sweat sticks to her forehead, and rolls down her back, and Toph has no idea how these people can stand it.

They come into view of a pair of guards and Toph remembers not to smirk when they snap to attention, or when she feels Kotone give them what feels like a threatening look.

They try and stop Toph from following Iroh, but Kotone gives them another threatening look, and turns towards Iroh for a moment. Toph can feel that placid smile he gives people that absolutely infuriates them, and Kotone makes the guards let them through.

“Prince Zuko.” She calls out. The room is…big, really big, and Toph can feel the metal sheathing the stone, and bisecting the room. The air is pretty hot, and still, but she can hear the soft burble of water somewhere, and the flickering snap of lanterns, and gets a general idea of the layout. “I have retrieved lord Iroh, as requested.” She says.

 _Retrieved_ , Toph thinks. She can’t really get a sense of him until he moves, sending small shock-waves through the earth. He’s taller than she expected, having imagined him being like….well, a bit like Sokka, but that’s probably because her entire experience with teenage boys comes down to Sokka, and he doesn’t feel the way she expected him to feel.

Iroh had described someone angry and confused, someone desperate and stubborn and frankly quite moody. Toph doesn’t feel that. Granted, he might just be really calm right now, but she doesn’t get that kind of…of _vibe_ from him. His energy runs pretty hot, hotter than Iroh’s does, at any rate, but it’s a lot smoother than she’d expect from someone prone to anger and moodiness. And the way he stands – he’s a little nervous, but he’s not _uncertain_. There’s nothing indecisive or conflicted in the way he’s carrying himself. Huh.

She can feel his heartbeat speed up a little bit as he turns towards Iroh, but then his weight shifts, and Toph is pretty sure he’s caught sight of _her_. Some of his muscles tense, and Toph has the slightly crawly feeling that she’s being evaluated, and that, as much as she is putting her all into ‘innocent blind girl, no trouble at all’ she’s also pretty certain he’s not buying it for a second.

Iroh never said Zuko had damn good instincts.

“What.” He says flatly, heartbeat petering out into something that felt more like exasperation than happy reunion.

“Oh, nephew, meet Lady Beifong, of the Fire Nation Colonies!” Iroh says cheerily. “Her parent’s have-“

And woah, okay, so they’re gonna lie to _Zuko_ too? Toph knew that Iroh had mixed emotions about his nephew, but she’d at least thought he _trusted_ the young man. That they might have an ally here.

“Beifong?”

Toph twitches, a little startled, but that’s not why her heart starts racing. She hadn’t even _felt_ Twinkletoes, but that was him, he was _here_. “Toph!” Aang cries out, happily. “Hey Zuko, that’s my earthbending teacher!”

Toph wants to smack her forehead into her palm, or better yet, smack Aang. She’d forgotten how much of an _idiot_ he was.

Iroh’s heart pounds, but Toph can feel the tension thrum along his spine, feel the way the breath he takes flares his chi, like he’s ready to _fight_ -

Zuko though? He doesn’t even react. He doesn’t tense, he doesn’t shift. He’s still. Very still. He takes a slow, even breath, then another, but he’s not building up his chi, not _burning_ , the way Iroh is.

“Uncle.” He says, very calmly. “I wanted to show you that I had captured the avatar.” He gestures vaguely towards the bars, where Toph can feel Aang’s heart thrumming now, and feel the boys wave. “As you can see.” Zuko says. “I was hoping you’d be proud to see that all your teaching and hard work and support during my banishment paid off.”

Toph doesn’t get it. Zuko keeps talking, but it’s like he’s not feeling anything, at all. Like the sound of his own voice is completely meaningless.

“Zuko-“

“If you could refrain from assisting foreign agents from breaking him out of the safest place in the world I could possibly find to stick a twelve-year-old boy before I manage to dethrone the Fire Lord, I would appreciate it.”

Toph is so weirded out by the utter lack of anything she’s getting off of Zuko that it takes her a full two minutes to comprehend what he just said.

“Since finally,” Zuko continues, when Iroh does not reply, frozen in shock. “It appears we are on exactly the same page as to where our loyalties lie.”

Iroh doesn’t flinch, but Toph does, at the bitter, icy hurt that slips into that last sentence.

“Um, Zuko?” Aang says hesitantly, but the older boy just turns, bows curtly in Toph’s direction, and then leaves the room, captain Kotone trailing after. Toph flinches again when the heavy door slams shut.

Iroh…Toph pulls away from Iroh, because he’s apparently _really_ got a few things to sort out for himself right now, and she strides over to the bars.

“Hey twinkletoes.” She grins. “Ya miss me?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so now that i've got all my players mostly in place, i'll start actually getting in to these character interactions i keep cutting off in the middle, i promise.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout-out to Gabett, whose rainfall of comments got me all hyped up and out came another chapter.

Zuko had had perilous balance, in the early days of his banishment. It had been autumn then, when they had ventured past the Southern Air Temple. A storm had had them way off course, and they ended up in artic waters.

Zuko still remembers the rippling dance of colors across the glistening wet hide of the pair of peacock-whales he’d been staring at just before he fell in the water. He remembers just as well the deep, inescapable, biting cold he’d felt upon waking up, and that intense scalding relief that followed, when he’d pressed his hands against the ships boiler in a desperate attempt to warm them up.

That shatterpoint between pain and relief, that’s what this felt like. This burning cold thing clawing through his lungs and scratching at his thoughts, thinning his breath and ravaging his spirit.

He’d thought, he’d always thought…that Uncle Iroh had _expected_ him to fail. It had been an impossible task, given to a disgraced child. He’d vacillated between gratitude and bitterness, for Iroh’s guidance, for his support and caring in the face of that realization that Uncle Iroh, who always believed in the best of him, had also believed that he would fail.

Zuko had wanted so badly to prove him wrong, to make him proud.

How _stupid_ he had been.

Once more the blow had come from the one he had least expected to hurt him.

He’d known uncle was lying, the moment he opened his mouth. He’d been comparing uncles ability to lie, Azula’s ability to lie, to the ability of the patrons of the court to lie on a _daily_ basis. It was instinctual to look for it, at this point.

It just hadn’t been till Aang opened his mouth that Zuko realized how truly deep the lie ran. It wasn’t about the little earthbender, it wasn’t about the Fire Lord, it wasn’t even about the Avatar. It was…

He’d finally realized, in that moment, in a flash of dull green eyes and the simmering stillness of his uncle’s carefully stoked chi, the breath before the dragons flame, that his uncle had never simply _expected_ him to fail. His uncle had _wanted_ him to fail.

To never find the avatar.

To never regain his honor.

To never go home.

Zuko sucks in air and grits his teeth, ignoring the watery sting of his eyes and the heat boiling off his skin, the ghost-fire kissing his fingertips, a shadow-width from actual flame. He needs to burn. Fire hurts, every child of the islands knows, and fire cleanses. He needs to burn.

A pair of courtiers look as if they might try and hold him up, and then they catch a good look, flinch, and move out of the way. Zuko heads towards the training grounds, too close to a flash-fire to even consider attempting to meditate, or letting it loose in the gardens.

… _in the land of earthbenders, the very world is your enemy. The battleground itself a trap. But even the world itself is not exempt from the absolute, and my absolute is this; given enough heat, **everything** burns_ …

It was a quote from the battlefield treatise of general Azulon, Zuko’s grandfather and Azula’s namesake. It was the first and foremost lesson taught to an Imperial Class Firebender – or at least those who hoped to become an imperial class Firebender. It was a precedent to achieve and a reminder that everything included yourself.

Zuko needed to breathe. He was burning now, he needed to breathe.

 _Feed it_ , his mother had told him, the first time he’d managed to make a flame _. Feed it, or it will feed itself, even if it has to feed on you_.

He needs to get away from the pillars and the flowers and the guardsmen who saluted as he passed them practicing maneuvers in the large open sand lots. The training grounds where all stone barriers and open air, which mostly lacked privacy, but there were a few smaller sand pits where one could practice out of the eye of passing public.

Zuko can’t unlock his jaw to command Kotone to hold back, because he can feel his control slipping, _because what was the point of all of this if uncle had always wanted him to fail_ …

He slashes one hand aside, heat shimmering off the air and his faithful captain stops in the shadow of an archway, turns precisely on heel, and then takes a guard position, rooting her feet to the ground.

Zuko thinks of forming a kata, thinks of just giving in and screaming, and instead bows his head, sucks in air, and _lets go_.

The sky screams, in a torrent of stolen air. His sleeves are flashed to ash in and instant, as fire ripples around his skin, and the sand around him congeals, red-hot, into cooling glass.

Zuko lets out a shuddery breath, feeling so much better, or least, feeling less terrible. He looks down at his hands, covered in soot, and watches vacantly the white tongues of fire rolling over his calloused palms, flickering across his knuckles, and shedding orange sparks.

 _White fire_ , he thinks. Not quite hot enough for blue. _Agni_ , he wonders, _what must my sister feel to burn that hot?_

That horrified thought turns into another, wondering how much sheer will it takes, to control the kinds of feelings that burn that hot, and now he thinks he has some inkling of an idea of just how true his claim had been. She was the best firebender in the world. _Please let her be safe_. He prays. She was vicious and cruel and had probably attempted to kill him at least once, but she was the only family he had left that hadn’t actually betrayed him.

Perhaps it was a poisonous kind of trust, between him and his sister, but at least it was still trust.

Agni, why _uncle_ …

“Incredible, Prince Zuko.” An elder’s strong, salted voice commented. “But undisciplined.”

Zuko sucks in another breath, turns slightly to face Commander Kuzon, and nods roughly. He’d bow, but he’s not sure yet whether or not he’s going to break. He feels like he’s bleeding. He isn’t, but he feels that way. He’s burning hotter than he ever has and he still feels cold.

Is this how the dragonrider of Anbawan felt, when he realized the smoke in the sky was a peaceful peoples funeral pyre? When he realized that the nation he looked to to give him strength had bought his loyalty with a lie?

He remembers the look on old Kuzon’ face, when Zuko uttered Aang’s name. Full of sadness and wist and _hatred_. Zuko doesn’t think he could survive holding on to that much hate. He doesn’t want to.

The dragonrider of old pins him down with a glittering olive gaze, fierce and fey. “You have all of your fathers strength.” He says, voice strong, as he steps down from the shadow of the pillars and into the sand lot with Zuko, stopping at the edge of the cooling sheet of raw glass. He cocks his head, his nostrils flaring slightly. “But none of passion for violence which gave him power.”

Zuko isn’t particularly in the mood for a lesson right now, but the elder is over a hundred years old and could probably incinerate Zuko with half an effort, should he so choose, so Zuko isn’t going to throw the snarling ball of bitterness in his chest into the world by opening his mouth and attempting to protest.

“What do you want, Prince Zuko?” Kuzon inquires, hands folded together in front of dark bronze robes.

 _I want to stop the war, I want to stop lying, I want_ -

“Stop thinking.” Kuzon snaps. “Start feeling. What do you _want_?”

A memory lifts in his thoughts, and Zuko sighs. “What a lord wants matters little compared to what his people need.” Zuko recites. _I have a duty-_

“A swordsmans philosophy.” Kuzon sneers. “Don’t bore me, I’ve been listening to that brat prattle about romantic ideals of noble grace for decades. Dragons care little for romantic ideals, boy. Dragons are fire made flesh. They _want_. You intend to take the dragon throne? You need to _be_ a dragon. Your people belong to you, the world belongs to you, what.do.you. _want_?”

Zuko wants the war to stop. Zuko wants his sister to not be a monster. Zuko wants little boys to grow up before being asked to do the impossible. Zuko wants to sleep like a child again. Zuko wants his father to not have hurt him. Zuko wants his mother to have not disappeared –

Zuko wants….

Zuko drops his gaze and stares at the reflection forming in the hardening glass, white fire dying to a flicker around his fingers, orange sparks drifting down and snuffing out. It takes an effort, but he manages to pull in a steadying breath.

“I want to not be afraid.” He says. Let’s out a trembling breathe, sucks another in.

“All men want to not be afraid.” Kuzon retorts. “That isn’t passion. That isn’t power. All failing souls seek courage.”

Zuko glares at him, and thin, age spotted lips twitch towards a smirk.

“It isn’t for me to know, boy. What do I care what you want?” Kuzon snorts, and calls a ball of fire to his hand, it ripples – gold-red- _green_ - _violet_ \- “But you ought to consider than any man who wants to reshape the world ought to know what he wants to do with it once he’s got it in his hands.”

Zuko frowns, his glare quieting into a stare, because he had told Kuzon the truth, that the boy he mourned had survived, and watched him turn his face away, watched his eyes darken with the haunted understanding of just what had been done, and right now he thinks that Kuzon isn’t talking about Aang at all.

“I _don’t_ want the world.” Zuko says roughly.

“No?” A thin brow lifts, an olive gaze narrows. “You think you can change anything without it?”

Zuko snarls, and fire sparks off his skin again. “What do _you_ want?” White fire again, flickering just under his line of sight, fueled on nothing but ferocity and air.

Kuzon smiles, like Zuko has finally done something right. “I made my peace with the things I could not change, boy. You have to, or you die. I’ve wanted many things, or thought I wanted many things, but only one want has kept me alive. It isn’t conviction or spite or determination, it is the very essence of your life, it survives all else. You’ve wanted something like that before, I can see it in you. It kept you alive, a thirteen year old damaged boy, when the world would have destroyed you. But then you realized you couldn’t have it, you’d never have it, and you made something up to replace it, and you think if you tell yourself enough times that it is all you want then it will become true, that it will make pain hurt less and suffering more worth it.”

The sand hisses, the glass melting again, bubbling, burning.

“You’re young.” He says. “You don’t think far enough ahead. This want of yours, the one you think will make things right, what will you do once you have it in your hands? If you don’t have an answer, then it wasn’t enough. Not enough to keep you alive. Not enough to warm that chill you’ve got clinging to your soul.”

Zuko doesn’t want to acknowledge that Kuzon is right, because it hurts. Because everything _hurts_. “You didn’t answer me.” Zuko grits out. “What do you want?”

Kuzon shakes his head, and then tilts his face towards the warm sky.

“I want to see dragons fly.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you were confused by that conversation, don't worry, so was Zuko.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was not the chapter i had intended to put out next, but this is the chapter that came pouring out today, so...i'll probably confuse you all later by rearranging things as the other chapters finish up. I don't know, the perspectives of the storyline might work out so this can stay here, but, just...fair warning. Enjoy!

… _in the land of earthbenders, the very world is your enemy. The battleground itself a trap..._

Azula bites her tongue as the ground roils and she feels the impact of shifting earth in her bones. Nearby, soldiers half trapped in earth cry out, loud and hoarse and afraid. Azula glares at them, and the next tremor knocks her off her feet. Her knees hit the dirt and her fingers dig into rich, ash-powdered farmland.

Azula had done something she had never done before.

She should be focused on the battlefield, on the ambush, on her men, on her enemy.

She had acted to protect him. To protect her brother. Her awkward, fierce, idiotic brother. She burned the letter until the paper was ashes and the ashes were nothing more than smoke.

She’d watched it trail into the pale, watery sky, and she felt very…fourteen, she thinks.

It hadn’t been flattery at all. It had been treason. It had been a terrible, simple compliment, and enough to get them both killed.

 _Father wouldn’t_! Her spirit screams. _Not me! I have done everything…I have_ ….

 _Over the killing fields that claimed Lu Ten_ , Zuko had written. And the two of them knew that as a battlefield commander, Lu Ten had been everything Fire Lord Azulon prized, everything Sozin’s line was meant to be. Cunning, powerful, and unyielding. Everything Azula trie- _everything she was!_

Would be.

Because Lu Ten had also been older. He’d been fully into his twentieth year, and had real military experience to back up his imperial education. He'd trained his own men and prepared for the siege of Ba Sing Se right alongside General Iroh, the Dragon of the West.

 _I expect your return to court upon your victory_. Her father had written. _Or not at all_ , may not have been there on paper, but it was there all the same.

Azula screams in rage, and unleashes her fury on the field.

 _I_ **am** _the best Firebender in the world_ , she seethes. _I will not fall here_!

 _But even the world itself is not exempt from the absolute_. Azula recites in her mind, tasting her own blood on her tongue, raising her gaze to the jagged earth and stone, to the trail of destruction the tremors left behind, leading back to... _And my absolute is this; given enough heat_ – “ _Everything_ burns.” She whispers coldly, eyes narrowed.

Blue fire eats earth, eats stone, eats cloth and withers roots and claims flesh. She can’t see her enemy, hidden as they _think_ they are, but she smiles, because she can hear them scream.

Azula reclaims her feet and casts darts of fire into the sky, a signal for her troops to rally, and for the tanks to move up the line.

They can move all the earth they want, but they still can’t bend steel.

“Azula!” Ty Lee cries out, her clear, sweet voice thin and strained. The chi blockers hands are on Azula’s arms a moment later, and grey eyes swim in her vision. “This is why you shouldn’t join the scouting party! You’re the commander, if you’d been hurt-“

“I am the best firebender in the world.” Azula says, cutting her friend off, though she refrains from slapping Ty Lee’s hands away. She has to let the other girl fuss at least a little, or Ty Lee will _fret_. The words soothe some of the ache in Azula’s chest, the very act of saying them out loud somehow…crystalizing. A brand of certainty sinks into her skin, as she thinks of the marks on paper, written in Zuko’s fine hand. “It will take more than this pathetic kingdom has to hurt me.”

She swallows the blood in her mouth, rather than spitting it out, because Ty Lee’s lashes lower just slightly, displaying the acrobats doubt. Ty Lee purses her lips and holds up a knowing finger, which she typically only does when she’s reciting something her father said. Ty Lee’s father had a very…particular way about him, when he taught, and all his daughters imitated it gleefully.

“Even the best firebender in the world can’t stop someone from getting _lucky_ , Azula.” Ty Lee says in a sincere scolding. Her grey eyes are full of worry, and her fingers are still tight on Azula’s wrists.

Ty Lee said it too. The best firebender in the world. As if it were a forgone conclusion, a matter of solid fact.

As if…As if she could possibly be more powerful than her father? Than the Fire Lord himself?

Azula bites down on her tongue again, because the pain in grounding. She breathes in deep, tasting soot and burnt flesh, listening to the snap of dying flames, the clattering rumble of the tank tracks, and the distant crying of dying men.

 _Is_ she a better firebender than the Fire Lord?

They say it – well, Zuko wrote it – but…does she believe it? _Can_ she believe it? Is it honestly true or does she only _want_ it to be true?

Azula stiffens at her own thoughts and bites down harder, ignoring that her eyes water, because it hurts.

She wants nothing of the sort. She is _loyal_. She has done everything her father-

Ty Lee jumps back when fire sparks around Azula’s hands. Azula doesn’t apologize, watching the older girl wince and cradle seared fingers. “I will not die here.” Azula declares.

Ty Lee looks up with pained, confused grey eyes, but Azula looks away. Azula looks over the killing fields, ruined farmland and raining ash. Perhaps her brother would think of how the ash would enrich the soil – how the crops would bounce back. Eventually. But Zuko was capable of that, of looking towards...how did he put it? Ah yes, _that glorious future_.

Azula didn’t understand how he could survive that way. Maybe her brother had some luck after all, or Agni’s blessing. Divine intervention seemed more likely.

But what she thought of was…killing fields of ruined farmland and raining ash, and somewhere, down there, feeding the crops that fed these _wretched_ people, were unmarked mass graves of _her_ people, and among them was Lu Ten.

“I _will not_ die here.” Azula repeats. She can’t see the sky through the smoke, but she can feel the sun overhead, and she swears this to Agni. “I _will_   go home.”

Ty Lee tilts her head and reaches out again, taking Azula’s hot palm in her own soothingly cool, dry one. “Of course we will, silly!” Ty Lee smiles, her face stained with smoke and ash catching white on her soft brown hair. “And we’ll go together!”

Azula’s hand spasms, clenching tighter around Ty Lee’s, and she doesn’t smile. She just…watches Ty Lee, as the acrobat goes cross-eyed, watching a drift of soot come down to land on her nose, as if it were a snowflake.

 _Together_ , Ty Lee says, as if it were a forgone conclusion, a matter of solid fact.

Smoke tickles Azula’s throat, and stings in her eyes, and she suddenly misses Mai, knowing the intelligent, sour-faced girl would undoubtedly be rolling her eyes and heaving a big sigh, drawing attention away from Azula’s still breath. Ty Lee’s hand feels…real, in a way the world doesn’t always feel, in a way Azula doesn’t _let_ the world feel, and she allows herself to enjoy it, just for a moment.

“Princess Azula.” Major Ling Yao reports, and doesn’t flinch when Azula raises a snapping wall of fire around herself and Ty Lee. Azula may not like the man’s shifty eyes, or the lazy smile constantly on his face, but his sheer nerve and lethal skills allow her to look past it.

A week ago, the major had been a captain. If the casualties continued as they had been, by next week he’d be a colonel. Field promotions were a hazardous way to make ones career, but thus far Major Yao had shown more competence and tenacity than half her command staff.

“Major.” Azula acknowledges him flatly, letting the flames flicker down, though blue fire still put off incredible heat, even in small flames. She draws her hand out of Ty Lee’s and rebalances herself.

Her feet no longer root to the ground, when she centers herself. She’d thought Zuko laughable, facing him in the north, how skittish he seemed, his balance always a breath away from motion, his weight on his toes like a slinking coyote-cat. Now she knew better.

The ground is the enemy.

Azula breathes in, her eyes narrowing as she prepares to sort through the Majors report, to memorize the details quickly and precisely. The acrid sharpness of soil turned to char almost stings, and she smirks.

 _Everything_ burns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully this chapter cleared up some questions about what Zuko was implying when he told his sister she was the best firebender in the world.  
> In the world, by default, also meaning better than the Fire Lord.  
> Also, yes, if you recognized a certain character in here, i totally nabbed him from another fandom.


	11. Chapter 11

Zuko spends a lot of effort in the next few days avoiding people. Specific people, and people in general. He avoids his uncle because…because he doesn’t think he can face him, not yet. Even thinking about him hurts, tears open a raw wound of pain and anger and heartbreak. The anger, Zuko knows, is dangerous – he’s so angry, all the time – the pain, he can endure, because it’s all he’s done for years, but the heartbreak….

It leeches into everything. It sits there, in his chest, pulling at his lungs and closing up his throat and catching him off guard at any moment.

He knows now, that uncle had…spirits. Uncle had wanted him to fail. But why?

That’s what Zuko can’t understand, and it’s tearing him to pieces.

So he avoids uncle, because knowing what he knows now hurts, and he doesn’t want to imagine what knowing _why_ might feel like. What justification someone he loves, someone he knows loves him, has for betraying him so deeply. Three years together, on a spirit-forsaken mission, and…

Zuko avoids the little earthbender, because she’s too close to uncle, and she reminds him too much of Azula. Her porcelain features and demure, downcast eyes, her soft dresses and softer voice completely contradicting the way the little blind girl walks around the palace like she owns the place. She’s playing harmless and innocent, and every time he sees her a chill runs down his spine, and then she’ll turn (no matter that she _can’t_ see him, can’t possibly even _hear_ him), and she’ll give him one of those awful, self-satisfied smirks, and wiggle her fingers hello.

The avatars earthbending teacher.

Yeah, Zuko is not going anywhere near that mess right now.

He avoids the court because he’s so unbalanced at the moment. He calls fire up with half a thought, still burning hot enough to flare white, and it’s _dangerous_. He needs to figure out how to master this…this snarling chaos in his heart, or he’s going to end up hurting someone. Possibly himself.

No Firebender is fire proof, and he almost set his bed-curtains aflame.

He’d ask Commander Kuzon, no matter how irritated he is with the elder at the moment, but when Kuzon is not dealing with the administrative affairs of the Home Guard, he seems to be having something of a personal tiff with Lord Piandao. A tiff which somehow also involves Lord Tai of Youkekuma, and the Matriarch of Anbawan.

Rumors abound in the court, given that three of those four parties are relics of Sozin’s reign, and Zuko is appalled by all of them. Some claim a torrid affair. Others that Lord Piandao is a bastard child of Lord Tai’s – (those grey eyes, they murmur, as if smoke were not nearly as common as noble gold, as if it weren’t blatantly obvious that they looked _nothing_ alike.) More still think that an _arrangement_ is being made. Everyone is expecting a marriage. (About time, they claim. Lord Piandao has mourned his late wife long enough. It doesn’t do for a Lord to be so long childless.)

Zuko thinks they forget that Shu Jing’s present Lord was adopted. That the Lord of Shu Jing has not been borne by a bloodline, but from Master to Apprentice. Their industry may have been mostly farmland and trade-ships, but Shu Jing’s legacy was the art of the sword.

Zuko thinks it has far less to do with lineage and far more to do with the quiet support he’s received from these parties, but he stays out of it. They’re deciding something, or attempting to, and he’s willing to wait for them to come to him.

He imagines it’s safer for all involved that way.

An unfortunate side effect of all this, however, is that in avoiding everyone else, Zuko has also unintentionally been avoiding Aang. Which is…rather unfair to the younger boy.

Which is why Zuko is skulking through hidden passages and shadows at an awful hour of predawn, making his way beneath the palace.

True, he doesn’t need to skulk, but sometimes, the practice just _feels_ good.

And he’s admittedly entertaining himself with the challenge of trying to get Captain Kotone to slip up, but she hasn’t lost him yet.

He’s played this game with all four of his private guard. Master Segeant Hisao doesn’t even attempt to suss him out. Ensign Yan Hui keeps up effortlessly. Sergeant Nishi doesn’t follow him so much as she calculates his most likely destination, and then beats him there. Kotone doesn’t keep up as well as the ensign does, but she’s far better at tracking him when he vanishes than anyone else.

Zuko can hear the prison guards sniggering over cards before he reveals himself, and he shoots them both a scowl as they startle and straighten up, attempting to hide their game.

He doesn’t particularly care that they’re playing cards, given that he isn’t particularly concerned about Aang staging a break-out (the little earthbender breaking in, maybe, but then, she doesn’t actually need to use the door, so the point is moot.) so much as he’s irritated with their attitude about it.

He doesn’t mind the cards. It’s the subtle sourness of ale he can smell in the stifled air that aggravates him. Kotone would probably gamble while on night duty – something to keep the mind active – but she’d never actually spurn due diligence.

Captain Jee had been that way with the men on the ship, something Zuko hadn’t learned to appreciate until…too late.

Well, Zuko used to have a very….textbook idea of discipline. He looks back sometimes and is a little amazed that none of them threw him overboard or smothered him in his sleep.

Though that’s probably because the Dragon of the West was on board, and there’d be nowhere to run.

Zuko falters a step, and this time it’s not the thought of uncle tearing through his calm, but the memory of his men, who served more honorably than a disgraced child had the right to expect, and whose reward was blood and snow. His fists clench and the guards flinch at the white sparks. One of them starts stammering out a confession, attempting to swear that he’d report himself to his commanding officer the moment his shift ended.

“At ease.” Zuko manages to growl out, before stalking through the heavy metal door.

Zuko was their commanding officer. He should have found the names of his men on the casualty reports. He should have delivered recompense to their families. He should have offered their names to the alter of Agni, and maybe prayed to Tui to let their souls rest in peace, and return to the fires of the sun spirit.

Zuko sucks in a sharp breath, hating himself in that moment, and the fire around his hands gutters. He should have done a lot of things he didn’t do.

“Z’ko?” Aang rustles a bit on his cot, alerted either by his ragged breathing or by the sharp light of the white fire before it went out, and the airbender sits up. “Am I dreaming?”

“…not at the moment?” Zuko says uncertainly, because he’s not actually convinced the boy is awake.

Grey eyes blink, and Aang rubs at them with tattooed hands. “Well, you didn’t cheep like Momo when you answered, so I think I’m not dreaming anymore. It’s not daytime, is it?”

“No.” Zuko says, striding closer to the bars. Kotone slips quietly into the chamber behind him, but stays by the door. “It’s actually rather the middle of the night. Sorry.”

“That’s alright.” Aang shrugs, and stumble off his cot, trailing his blanket as he pads softly towards the bars. “I can sleep during the day.”

The airbender is pale, Zuko notes. He’s always pale, but he looks almost sickly now. The daylight shafts provide light, but not much actual sunshine, and the stifling atmosphere saps at the airbender’s spirit. Zuko clenches his fists again, bitter anger welling back up, but he forces it down, at least enough to stop himself from setting a fire. He hates this. It isn’t fair, not to any of them.

“How…are you?” Zuko asks, lowering himself to sit. Aang copies him, and lets out a little breeze-blowing sigh.

“Alright, I guess.” He shrugs. He fiddles with the edges of the blanket, glances up at Zuko, and then away. “Toph has been trying to teach me some earthbending, but I just…don’t get it. I can’t earthbend at all.”

Zuko looks heavenward for a moment, trying to reconcile that the avatar was learning earthbending right under the heart of the palace with his nerves, and largely deciding that he was just going to have to let that one go. At least it meant Aang had a friend when Zuko wasn’t around.

An unsettling friend, but a friend.

“It’s your natural opposite.” Zuko says, trying to cheer him a little. “It will take more time to master than any other element.”

“I guess.” Aang shrugs again, looking dejected.

Zuko frowns, and drums his fingers on his knee, thinking. “Say, how good an earthbender is your friend?”

“Toph?” Aang looks up, blinking, and then grins. “She’s the best earthbender in the world! She’s won the Earth Rumble Championship three times running! They call her the Blind Bandit.”

The best earthbender in the world. Running around the Fire Nation Royal palace.

Joy.

Zuko sighs, somewhat aggrieved, and slumps a little. They fall quiet for a minute.

“So…um…have you been busy?” Aang inquires, trying to act nonchalant but not being at all subtle.

Zuko winces a little. “I…um….there were some….I just realized some things, and it….hurt. I didn’t mean to just…abandon you down here.”

“Oh.” Aang peers into his face, looking concerned. “Are you okay?”

Zuko laughs a little raggedly. “I’m plotting to overthrow my father, I just learned that my uncle has actively moved against me for years, up to and including actual treason and espionage, my sister is off fighting the same fight that killed my cousin, and I…I don’t know what to do. I thought I could…spirits, I don’t know _what_ I thought. I’m not okay, Aang, I’m _terrified_. I’m terrified all the time. I think I’m gonna end up getting us both killed.”

Zuko hunches over, fingernails digging into his kneecaps. He shouldn’t have said that, any of it. Aang didn’t deserve his…his failures, all laid out. Aang didn’t deserve to carry his fears.

“Um…I’m sorry.” Aang whispers, fidgeting. “I…um. Your uncle has been talking to me, actually.”

Zuko doesn’t move. He just breathes in, as steadily as he can, and he can feel Aang wince a little.

“Have you…um, ever heard of the Order of the White Lotus?” Aang asks.

“No.” Zuko says shortly.

“Well…it’s this big secret society, I guess, and your uncle is part of it. He says that the Order of the White Lotus ‘ _transcends the boundaries of the four nations, seeking philosophy, beauty, and truth._ ’ He says that they want to help the Avatar restore balance to the world.” Aang says. "So...that's good, right?"

In the absence left by Zuko’s stunned, disbelieving silence, there is an indelicate, derisive snort.

Aang and Zuko both turn incredulously toward captain Kotone, whose gold eyes are glittering in the dim.

“Forgive me, Prince Zuko.” She’s says curtly, stance firmly rooted and hands clasped behind her back in perfect military posture. “But what do the Avatar and the Order of the White Lotus think they know of _balance_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh dear freaking....ugh. I keep trying to get back around to Kuzon, because the story there is just begging to get out, but my other plotlines somehow worm themselves into the way. Too many, you think?  
> There were three different possible endings for this chapter, each leading into a different plot. This is the one you got, and you have no idea where its going yet. But i'll get there. Eventually.


	12. ASIDE: Zuko and Ozai

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY: So this is totally out of place in the plot, but i wrote it and i wanted to post it, so. This DOES NOT take place directly following the last chapter, I will be going back to that point in time because obviously Kotone has some explaining to do. But for now, here is this, enjoy.

Zuko steps lightly into the Fire Lord’s private tea room, leaving Master Sergeant Hisao outside. Aside from a few aggressive propositions for marriage and one attempted poisoning, his guards haven’t had much to do in the way of protecting Zuko, and in the places he perhaps needs the most protection, they are powerless to interfere.

He maintains his personal guard anyway. They serve as advisors and keen lookouts, and Zuko knows that each of them has ties to certain factions within the Fire Nation which all have keen interests in the crown prince’s welfare.

One wall of the tea room is dominated by a massive, painstakingly detailed map of the world, and the opposite wall opens up into a garden balcony, letting a warm, perfumed breeze rustle in through the sheer drapes. His father is already seated at a low, ornate table. Zuko can tell by the taste of the spicy scent in the air that his father’s tea is laced with liquor. Not enough to impair, he’d judge, but enough to burn when swallowed.

Zuko has long grown past the stiff-legged walk towards the Fire Lord’s company, though not the bright-edged hyperawareness that thrums between fear and danger. The grace that takes him from the door to the cushion is granted by a fatalistic kind of acceptance. He has made his decision to an act of treason. If his father discovers it, and his life is forfeit, so be it.

Most of these meetings between them are short and filled with silence. Zuko will hand over the reports and missives regarding the matters he has taken to overseeing, and sip his tea while his father deigns to peruse them, or not. Occasionally his father will make an idle inquiry – usually about the court, occasionally about his observations while he ‘abroad’ as most of the nobility call it.

Today, Zuko slips down onto the cushion, pours his own cup, and inhales the scent of citrus and spices before letting out a small sigh.

His father glances towards him, and their gazes happen to catch. Zuko’s heart pounds harshly, and he breathes through it, answering once he’s certain his voice will not give anything away. “Uncle has been pestering me to entertain some of the many marriage proposals I’ve received at court.” Zuko says. It’s not entirely true, but neither is it a lie. Zuko is very, very careful about lying in the Fire Lord’s presence.

Zuko is still finding it difficult to speak to his uncle, though Iroh makes an attempt to at least engage him. Zuko has questions he needs the answers to and can’t ask, and uncle never seems to find him when he’s alone, in private. It seems there are answers his uncle doesn’t want to give.

Instead, uncle comments on the flowers blooming in the gardens, and chuckles at the young courtiers who try to catch Zuko’s attention, and comments that Zuko might be happier with a young lady in his life. (It is usually at this point where Toph will pipe up in her too-sweet voice, and Zuko will scowl at the little earthbender and storm off).

His father snorts, a brief, masculine sound. “He was much the same way when I was your age.” Ozai comments, tapping one of the scrolls idly.

Zuko’s fingers tighten around his cup and he glances at his fathers profile, and doesn’t glance away again. He hadn’t known that, hadn’t even considered it really. Uncle Iroh teasing a teenaged Ozai as younger men, as brothers were wont to. They’d always seemed so…different, to Zuko. So distant. “He met his own wife that way.” Ozai’s lip ticks a little. “Though many would remark that Iroh entertained such proposals perhaps _too_ much.”

Zuko glances briefly upward, because he really doesn’t want to think about uncle Iroh’s torrid youth.

“You didn’t meet mom at court.” Zuko says quietly. His father stops tapping the scroll, and his lips turn back down. “No.” He says.

Zuko sips at his tea, focusing on the warm burst of flavor rather than the coldness of the sudden quiet between them.

To his surprise, his father continues. “Firelord Azulon arranged the match on the prestige of her ancestry.” He sneers. “Regardless that she was a woman who’d never set foot in court and who was engaged to another man. Who was _in love_ with another man.”

The paper sears against his father’s fingers, and Zuko sets his teacup down. He stares at Ozai, because he’s talking about Zuko’s mother. Because he’s _talking_ , and Zuko suddenly realizes that they haven’t had an actual conversation since Zuko was a child.

“Her grace was that she was a good actress, when she wanted to be.” Ozai murmurs, setting the scroll aside and lifting his piercing gaze to Zuko’s face.

“Do you miss her?” Zuko asks, despite knowing it’s likely to anger his father. It’s just…he’s always wondered. If Ozai ever had regrets.

His father doesn’t answer the question.

“You remind me of her.” Ozai comments, his gaze steely and unreadable. “Perhaps too much.”

Zuko swallows, but doesn’t look down. He holds the Fire Lords gaze. “Azula always took more after you.” Zuko says, because he has to say something. He wonders if his father is….he supposes _sad_ is a laughable idea, but perhaps…disappointed, that Zuko was not more like him.

Ozai’s lips quirk up again. “I was never so obedient a child as your sister has proven to be.”

No, Zuko supposes, Ozai wouldn’t have been. Obedient children don’t arrange the assassinations of their forbearers. It’s ironic, he thinks, that that makes Zuko the rebellious child, if Azula is the obedient one.

Well, given the givens…treason was probably as rebellious as you could get.

Zuko tilts his head, studying his father. This is perhaps as close as they’ll ever be, he thinks. This conversation, here and now, almost but not quite reminiscing. There are things he’s wondered, and this is perhaps his only chance to ask.

“What drives you?” Zuko asks, thinking of Kuzon’s wisdom, of thrones and dragons and _wants_. “What gives you power?”

Ozai lifts a sharp brow, and Zuko glances aside, towards the sprawling map of the world, and he can see Ozai sneer from the corner of her eye as he follows Zuko’s gaze.

“What a childish question.” Ozai remarks. “I am the Fire Lord, Zuko. I am not _given_ power, I _take_ it, as is my right.”

Zuko turns to look at his father again, and his face seems more that of a stranger than before. “Why?” Zuko asks softly.

Ozai chuckles, gold eyes burning. “Because, son of mine, we can.”

Ozai is right.

Zuko takes after him very little.

But probably more than either of them think.


	13. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay...i have a rotating work schedule so sometimes you'll get updates in a rush and sometimes there will be a two week gap. Thanks to everyone who left me comments and kudos, they absolutely brighten my day!

“Um…”Aang fidget, glancing wide-eyed between Zuko and the captain. “There are four elements, and four seasons, and four nations, and all make the cycle of the world. As the only physical being with the ability to bend all four elements, it is considered the Avatar's duty to master the four bending arts and use that power to keep balance among the four nations of the world, as well as between mankind and spirits.” Aang says, voice slightly rattled, as he blurts something out from memory.

Zuko can’t quite help the unimpressed look he gives the young airbender, and Aang flushes a little.

“I ran away before Monk Gyatso could really teach me….avatar stuff.” Aang mutters. “I didn’t want…” He curls in on himself a little bit. “I didn’t want things to change.”

“It isn’t your fault.” Zuko and Kotone both say softly. Zuko gives his captain a studying look and she finally moves, crossing the floor between them and settling herself on the ground opposite Aang. Zuko lowers himself as well, sweeping the trailing edge of his over-robe beneath himself.

The room suddenly seems much bigger around them, as Kotone searches the Avatar’s face with a sharp gaze.

Zuko watches her with a sharp gaze of his own. He’s never truly figured out his loyal captain, aside from discovering her loyalty. The first time he had slipped up, had mentioned things he oughtn’t in front of Kotone and Yan Hui, he’d nearly attacked them in a panic, certain they would turn on him.

But they hadn’t.

Neither had Hisao or Nishi, and the relief he’d felt, the quiet confidence he held for having them there, for being able to trust them at his back, was sometimes the only thing keeping him grounded, keeping him sane, through the stress and duplicity of it all.

He wants to lunge now, to demand an answer, but he refrains, digging his fingernails into his palms. She’d spoken boldly, but there was….something close to fear, in the way she leaned slightly away, in the way her gaze couldn’t quite meet his, in the pallor of her face. He didn’t want them to be afraid of him.

“If you had not been the Avatar, Aang the Airbender, where would you belong?” She finally asks, her voice gentler than Zuko has ever heard it.

Aang’s mouth parts for a moment. He looks puzzled, like the answer is obvious, and finally comes out with it. “At the temples, with Monk Gyatso. Until I was grown. Travelling. Maybe serving as a messenger. The couriers always got to meet such interesting people! “Aang smiles  bit, but it fades with the recollection that all that is gone now.

Zuko hates that look, that wounded grief, carefully stifled and shoved away by a boy who shouldn’t have to hide such a thing.

Kotone nods. “And where would…hmm, The Blind Bandit belong?” She asks, not even pretending that the Crown Princes’ Guard didn’t know exactly whom Toph Beifong really was.

“Uh…The Earth Kingdoms.” Aang says.

“And a waterbender?” She prompts him again. Zuko can tell she’s leading them somewhere, but he’s not entirely sure what she’s getting at. The mixed children in the colonies?

“With the Water Tribes.” Aang says.

“Ah,” Kotone lifts brow. “But this waterbender is not of the Water Tribes.”

“But…the elements belong with their own nation.” Aang says. “That’s the way it’s always been. You have to see it, how the Fire Nation trying to take over the world has set everything out of balance! It’s not right!”

“So only the Avatar may claim more than one people as his own?” Kotone asks. “You should know better than that. You were not born to pull our peoples apart, young one. You exist to show the world what it can achieve when it works together.”

“I don’t get it.” Aang says, looking unhappy, pulling the blanket tighter around his thin shoulders like he wants to yank it over his head and hide.

“I suppose I’m doing a poor job of explaining it.” Kotone mutters. “What do you know of the Fire Nation _before_ the war?”

“Well…when I was a kid, we’d visit the Fire Nation during festivals, and your people had the _best_ dances! My friend Kuzon used to save me some chocolate, because the Fire Nation made amazing chocolate, and he took me to see the dragons. Monk Gyatso said that the Fire Nation was a people of passion and will, and that from them I could learn…” Aang trails off, looking at the floor. “He said that people who burn know when _not_ to. That from them I could learn temperance.” He looks away, his eyes watery, and blinks rapidly. “I didn’t really pay attention to…to the nation as a _nation_. I was just a kid. I’m still just a kid.”

Zuko winces a little, feeling that old mix of guilt and anger churn in his gut.

Kotone dips her head, conceding that point. “Did you meet other airbenders during such visits?” Kotone inquires.

Aang cocks his head. “Well, there were always airbenders sort of everywhere.” The boy shrugs. “We are… _were_ nomads. Are you….are you asking about the island messengers? I remember a lot of older apprentices always wanted a courier post on the Fire Islands, because the island breezes where awesome, but the Monks always said that it was difficult for a temple child to claim such a post who weren’t born to it, which I never really understood. I mean, how are you born for a job? Uh…aside from yours.” Aang says, glancing at Zuko, who shrugs.

Kotone gives Aang a somewhat…short look, as if he has completely missed the point. “Young one, they meant that literally.” She says. “As in, it was difficult for a temple child to claim such a post in favor of the airbenders born to the Fire Islands.”

Aang looks gobsmacked, and then scandalized. “How could they be born on the Islands? Pregnant nuns are supposed to go to the Eastern and Western Temples! Everyone knows it’s dangerous to travel when you’re going to have a baby!”

Zuko covers his face with one hand, and Kotone’s flat look intensifies.

“Not all airbenders belonged to the Temple.” She says. “And not every mother of an airbender was a nun.”

“They were our people?” Zuko asks hoarsely, as the facts coalesce into understanding, bitter as gall.

“Some were.” Kotone nods, and Zuko can feel the ache of grief to his bones. How could Sozin have…the Temples were unforgiveable, but they were _other_. Their _own_ _people_ ….

“How could he have hated them so much?” Zuko asks painfully.

Kotone’s amber eyes fall on him, calm and clear as a summer morning, full of understanding. “He didn’t.” She says softly.

Zuko lets out a sound of disbelief, pressing one hand against the writhing knot in his chest. He can smell the singed silk, can feel the shimmer of the air as his skin boils heat. He needs to calm his breathing, but all he can think of is Sozin slaughtering their own loyal kin, as unnatural and wrong as taking a blade to ones own healthy flesh.

“They were the answer.” Kotone's voice seems far away, and yet it’s the only thing he can focus on. “You see, if the Temples were to fall…airbending would survive.”

“But it didn’t!” Aang protests, loudly and angrily.

Kotone looks solemnly at him and lowers her gaze. “They weren’t alone.” She comments. “Airbenders in the Islands of Fire. At the height of our Empire, the _true_ height of our Empire, Earthbenders moved here and learned to bend magma, and raise fire breaks in preparation for the burning season. They modeled the foundations of Fire Fountain City, and built these tunnels under Karudera.” She gestures to the great cavern around them. “To protect its people when the storms were at their worst.”

 _Karudera_. A name Zuko’s only read in scrolls, the old name for Caldera City, the proper name. The name of the clan whose blood ran through his veins. “And so did the Waterbenders, for where else does such a child belong than in the palm of the ocean? The Order of the Painted Lady was comprised of fire-born Waterbenders. They were great healers and artists, and they saved many from the tide when the tsunami’s swept over the isles.” She hesitates, barely meeting Zuko’s gaze. “My own grandmother was Lady Tsuruko no Shiromizu, _the_ painted lady, a waterbender of Jang Hui. The wife of its lord.”

Zuko’s nostrils flare, sucking in a startled breath as he stares into her amber eyes, those eyes that always teased of nobility. He hadn’t been wrong. Shiromizu had been a great clan, before the war. Before they were charged with treason, before its lord and lady were executed for it, before its people were abandoned and left desolate. The once sprawling river-city of Jang Hui was now no more than a flotsam village, poor and unlooked after. She was of the disgraced bloodline.

Her eyes are pure amber, too, not that fabled amber ringed in vivid blue that spoke of Water-in-Fire. Her blood may have been of the Painted Lady, but the bending of her legacy had not held out.

“But…”Aang says tremulously, “But if…if there were Firebenders _and_ airbenders _and_ earthbenders _and_ waterbenders….what _happened_?”

Kotone drags her haze back to the bow, her head a little lower than before. “That…is a story best heard from someone who was there.” She glances at Zuko again. “If you would permit, Prince Zuko…I could escort you both to meet my grandmother.”

Zuko cocks his head, slightly overwhelmed and rather taken aback. “She… _survived_?” He questions.

She hadn't been a child when Sozin started this war. She’d be _ancient_ by now. Not to mention the fact that she had also been _publicly executed_.

A sly, secretive smile flits across the captains proud face. “In a manner of speaking.” She says.


	14. Chapter 13

Sokka leans low against the wood and canvas, pressing himself into the shallow belly of the canoe as it drifted. Ash itches as it falls from the sky and lands against his neck, crumbling into dust. Ash was always falling from the sky now.

The canoe slips silently through the small canal, and Sokka prays his sister doesn’t sneeze. They’re trusting the current to take them where they need to go, invisible and motionless in the black on black of night. Sokka breathes tightly as reeds scrape the canoe beneath his chest, like a spirit raking claws cross his soul. He shivers.

Finally, he feels the canoe glide to a halt, caught in the bars of the grate in the wall. Sokka lifts his head, feels Katara shift, and puts a hand on her shoulder, keeping her down. He peeks over the lip of the canoe as little as possible, watching, waiting.

Water sloshes, and a blue lantern flashes on the other side of the tunnel. He lightens his grip on Katara and taps her shoulder, shifting so she can move forward. He can see the faintest shimmer in the water she bends, and flinches when it sparks, cutting iron.

They both flinch, and freeze, and wait.

No roar of fire. No sudden drop of earth. Sokka carefully lifts a tarp from the bottom of the canoe and uses it to hide any flashes and muffle any sound as Katara works through the bars.

Even in the pitch dark, Sokka can feel the wall looming above him, up and up and up. It’s old. Really old, and he wonders why they built it, so long ago. Long before Fire Lord Sozin, long before Conqueror Chin.

Sokka catches the grate when it jars free, and carefully lifts it through the water, setting it far enough away that none of the sharp edges will catch on the canvas of their canoe. Katara wipes sweat from her brow, and shuffles back down on her belly. Sokka pulls on the wall a little, urging their small vessel forward, and does the same. The drainage canal is a tight fit, and it reeks. They had to design the canoe to be small enough and low enough to fit through, and Chief Hakoda had not been happy when he realized that it wasn’t going to be big enough to carry his grown warriors.

Sokka feels his heartbeat stutter when they scrape the walls, and tries not to think about how narrow and small the tunnel it, about how there is less than a fingers width between his back and the ceiling, about how far they are from either end, and how very trapped they’d be if the canoe was wedged in. He can hear himself start to pant, and Katara clearly can too. She grabs his wrist after a few blind tries, and squeezes.

The canoe continues to glide.

They reach the far end and their allies lift the other grate free, and pull the canoe along. They glide under a low stone bridge, and down a gentle sloping road, and someone pulls them to a stop before they disappear into another tunnel. The blue lantern is suddenly in Sokka’s face and he winces.

“Sorry.” They mutter. “I’m Jino. You’re Hakoda’s son?” The man says quietly, helping Sokka out of the canoe.

“Sokka.” Sokka says. “Yes.” Sokka bends to take a sack of rice from Katara, stuffed beneath them in the slight craft. He passes it to Jino, who lets out a sift adulation to Guan Yin. Katara hands him another, and another. It isn’t much, all told, but they smuggled in what they could, with the promise of more. Sacks of rice and carefully packed jars of fish oil.

Ba Sing Se had panicked, when the fields of planted crops around their great city burned and burned, and the Dai Li had instantly implemented a rationing system for their stores. The upper ring likely didn’t even notice, but down in the lower ring, the people were starving and desperate, and didn’t have enough to go around. It would make them a pitiful resistance, when the Fire Nation army reached the second wall.

Katara slings a small satchel of medical supplies over her shoulder, and quietly asks where a healer would be most useful. She nods to Sokka before she goes, and he watches her back as she fades into the shadows. Jino leads Sokka himself further into the lower ring. He’s meant to gather reports from those inside the wall, what they’ve seen and gathered about the Fire Nation forces sieging them, but Jino is jumpy, like he expects to be attacked from all sides.

It takes Sokka a bit longer than it should to realize that Jino’s not jumpy because he’s waiting for a Fire Nation Ambush. No, he’s afraid of the Dai Li.

Bad enough their beset from the outside, Sokka broods darkly, but what kind of place had to fear its own supposed protectors as well?

They slip down a few streets and alleyway and then into the subbasement of a tea shop. Sokka flinches for his weapon when he spots the guard uniform, but the Earth Kingdom soldier merely lifts a slat-and-pepper brow and rubs a weary hand across his jaw.

“You’re Sokka?” He inquires. “I didn’t expect…”

“What?” Sokka asks, a little too sharply. His voice cracks a little, and the guards eyes darken further.

“Someone so young.” The guard murmurs.

Sokka would grumble, but he’s had that reaction before, from the Earth Kingdom soldiers who came to supply the fleet. By their standard, Sokka is too young. In the Earth Kingdoms, you can’t legally join the army until you’re sixteen, and even then you can’t be deployed to the front lines until you’re eighteen, unless…well, unless it’s you or no one.

“Out there, the war doesn’t care.” Sokka says. “You fight or you die.”

The guard nods, looking terrible resigned. “It’s really come to it then.” He sighs. “The last stronghold in the west, and Princess Azula has come for us.”

“Yeah.” Sokka says quietly. “It’s come to it.”

The Guard shakes his head, hands clenching and unclenching. He’s staring at the wall over Sokka’s shoulder, but he’s not really seeing anything. Sokka’s seen that look on veterans before, when they’ve seen too much and they know they’ll yet see more.

“My people don’t even know.” The man mutters. “The wall is broken, and they don’t even…”

“There’s ash raining from the sky!” Sokka blurts out, disbelieving. “How can they not know? How can the king-“

“The _king_ doesn’t know.” The guard cuts him off. “You don’t understand. The king…The Dai Li rule this city. The Dai Li rule this city and they say there is no war in Ba Sing Se. And so… _there is no war in Ba Sing Se_.” He looks helpless. Hopeless.

“It’s doesn’t matter!” Sokka says, scared, and angry that he’s scared, by how defeated this man already looks. They haven’t lost yet. They haven’t! “The war is here, and we’ll fight it. We have to fight it!”

“Oh yes, we’ll fight it.” The man says, a wry smile touching his lips like a grimace. “But I just don’t think we can win.”

Sokka….Sokka doesn’t know what else to say, to that. So he takes his written reports, and he looks to Jino, and they leave.

He finds his sister crying into a brick wall, shoulders heaving with great sobs that have no sound. She’s learned to be very quiet when she cries, so as not to give themselves away.

“Katara?” Sokka crouches down next to her, and she throws herself against his chest, like she would when she was a little girl, when she stubbed her toe, or had a bad dream, or made Gran-Gran mad. He rests a hand on top of her hair and hugs her back, squeezing a little too tight, but he needs something to hold onto too, just for a moment.

“Th-there was an old woman.” Katara sniffles. “She was sleeping, I just thought she was sleeping. She was just sitting there, against the wall, and I tried to wake her up. She was just sitting there, Sokka, and she wouldn’t….she wouldn’t wake up.” Katara cries frightfully, her voice hoarse and shaken against the shell of his ear. “They’re dying here, Sokka. The war hasn’t reached them yet and they’re just dying here. There’s no food, there’s no medicine, there’s so many people in the streets and they’re j-just letting th-them die!”

Sokka doesn’t try and calm his sister. She needs to let it out, to be rid of it, and better she do it where the warriors won’t see. They’ll think she’s a child. Just a silly girl, and she isn’t. She so strong, but no one can be that strong all the time. So Sokka holds his sister, and thinks just one terrible thought. She’s wrong.

The war has reached them, and this is what it looks like. It’s not just…just battles and blood and fire. It’s also fear, and sickness, and hunger, and it’s here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So i got stuck on this chapter because it was just....sad. Like...ugh. But i finally got through it! Yay!


	15. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So i uploaded two chapters to make up for the long wait. Hurrah!

Toph perks up when she notices Captain Kotone. Especially when she notices that the good captain, who usually feels like retrained exasperation when she feels like anything at all, now feels more like…excitement. There’s a power in her stride that hasn’t been present before, and her heart is pounding. Fast. Too fast, and that doesn’t feel like excitement, the way her stride does. That feels like fear.

Curiosity peaked, Toph politely dismisses herself from the Fire Sages company and slips after the guard captain, wondering what she was up to. Toph had followed Iroh to the Fire Nation for adventure, and found twinkletoes, which was a direct blessing from Guan Yin, but aside from that….well, it was kinda boring. Iroh was quieter these days, when he wasn’t spending an obnoxious amount of time with the super old Fire Sages, or off having secret meetings with the swordsman, and no matter how jovially he spoke, he seemed…disappointed. And he’d given Toph a cold brush off the one time she’d tried to maybe bring it up, to be supportive, and that had unexpectedly hurt. He left her by herself more often, encouraging her to go mingle with the other young courtesans as if she actually were who they told people she was, as if that was really why she was here, and what she wanted to do.

And that was just annoying.

She was also struggling with trying to figure out how to make Twinkletoes understand Earthbending. She was tearing her hair out, really, trying to make him stand his ground, but if he couldn’t even do that with her when they were screaming mad at each other, there was no way he could do it with the earth itself. He was a total pushover!

And even if she was the greatest earthbender in the world, she was also only twelve. She just didn’t know how to…to convince a person to change, like that. To convince them to reorient their instincts. Toph had been _born_ to bend earth. Aang, avatar or no avatar? He was an airbender to the core. Rooting oneself down, the stubborn refusal to move, to bend, to give – it was a foreign concept. And she just couldn’t figure out how to fix that.

So she followed Kotone, who sent Yan Hui off like he was a messenger-bird, who came back in the middle of the night with somebody in tow.

Toph didn’t have to creep, down in the tunnels, not when they softened beneath her feet and curved to her desire. The person Yan Hui and Captain Kotone where taking down there, whoever they were, they stepped awful light. Spy-light, rolling so softly from heel to toe they barely made an impression on the ground. It was the kind of step that made Toph think of stories one of her nannies used to tell her, of thieves gliding over nightingale floors and sneaking into dragon’s dens, and of less kind stories, of assassins slipping into royal chambers, and slaughtering the little princes and princesses in their beds.

Toph slipped under the passage, when they reached the guards and the door, and tunneled herself around and inside, the earth parting before her like a rippling curtain, with barely a whisper. She was getting better at it, but the stone was still brittle, and she could feel it fracture and splinter when she bent it back into place.

Prince Zuko was already inside, waiting for his guards. He was playing some sort of game with Aang, both of them lying near the bars. It took her a little bit to hone in on the feel of the glass marbles between them.

“Toph!” Aang yelped excitedly, spotting her, and Prince Zuko flinched. Toph smirked, totally ready to jibe him about it, but Kotone came through the door before Toph had the chance to think of something appropriately snarky.

“Captain.” Zuko pushed himself up, walking towards them, and Aang did too, but….Toph frowned. Aang actually pushed himself up, instead of huffing out a breeze to spring himself to his feet, and he was moving funny, tense and slow, like his bones hurt. Toph didn’t like it.

“This is Jin Pei, Prince Zuko. A cousin of mine.” Yan Hui says softly. Zuko lets out a soft exhalation.

“That’s…creepy.” Zuko mutters.

“Huh?” Toph pipes up, and Zuko twitches. She loves that, so much.

“He looks….eerily like Aang.” Zuko answers her for once, which is a delightful surprise. He never answers her. Most of the time, he storms off the moment she opens her mouth, which is hilarious, but a little bit cold.

“That _is_ the point, sir.” Captain Kotone murmurs, though her weight shifts like she’s uneasy herself.

“I suppose it is.” Zuko sighs. “Let’s…let’s just do this, then. We need to get out of here.”

“Ooh, we’re taking a field trip?” Toph grins, rubbing her palms together. “That’s what I’m talking about!”

“We’re not taking you anywhere.” Zuko retorts.

“Aw, c’mon!” Toph stomps her foot, crossing her arms. “That’s not fair!”

“Please?” Aang calls softly, slumped into the bars. “I – I’d like her to come. She’s my friend. Please.” He sounds small and tired and…lonely.

Zuko caves. Immediately. Seriously, he has less resistance to Twinkletoes’ squirrel-puppy eyes than a sand-wall to blasting jelly. What a sap.

…Why does that never work for her?

She gives him her best innocent koala-lamb looks and he looks back at her like she’s a rattle-viper with two heads.

“Fine.” Zuko sighs, shoulders tense and voice annoyed.

“Yes!” Toph claps her fist into her palm in victory, grinning wide. She was going on a field trip!

“So…uh. Where are we going?” She asks.

She shouldn’t have asked.

She ended up on another boat. Another nasty, wobbly, spirits thrice-cursed boat, clinging to the rail and trying not to retch.

But she wasn’t so miserable that she stopped paying attention to Twinkletoes. The moment they’d scuttled out of the secret passages and into the cool night air in the gardens, he’d drawn in such a deep breath that he practically floated away with it.

But he didn’t. Float away. Here they were, scot free out and in the open, with nothing and no one to stop them but Zuko and his guards, and Aang…Aang wasn’t going anywhere. He bounced from rail to rail with an annoying springiness, of course, and danced along the railing, much to the guards discontent, playing with the ocean breezes, and other than that, he drifted along in Zuko’s wake like a turtle-duckling following a mongoose-swan.

He didn’t even feel like he wanted to go anywhere else, be anywhere else. He really, really trusted Zuko, to…well, Toph didn’t really know, actually. She knows Zuko told Aang that he wanted to end the war, that they _needed_ to end the war, but Toph didn’t know how, exactly, Zuko planned to do that.

She had a sneaking suspicion that Zuko didn’t either.

And…and she knows Iroh promised the same thing, but she doesn’t know what he plans to do either! And….even though they both said they wanted to end the war, they weren’t working together on that. Everyone said a lot of things, but so far, Toph didn’t see them actually _doing_ anything about it.

“Urgh.” She groaned, pressing her face against a wooden beam.

“Oh man, what’s that smell?” Aang said nasally, clearly having pinched his nose.

“Twinkletoes, one word outta you and I’m gonna-“ Toph growls, raising a feeble but threatening fist.

“It’s the river.” Captain Kotone says from just a step away, startling the heebie jeebies outta Toph. Darn spirit-forsaken boats – Toph could barely feel anything!

“What about it?” Toph asks, swallowing bile and scrunching her toes. She really, really doesn’t like wooden ships. At all. Or the rocking. The rocking wasn’t great either.

“It feels sick.” Aang says. “And the water is all…murky and oily.” He sounds small, like he’s hunched in on himself.

 _He carries the spirit of the world_ , Toph reminds herself. Anything that upsets the balance of nature probably doesn’t feel so great when you’re that sensitive to it.

“It didn’t used to be like this.” Kotone murmurs, her voice a little bitter. “Before my clan was dishonored, this was the most beautiful river valley in all the Fire Nation. It rivaled even the great falls of old Taku. But when Fire Lord Azulon came for us, he did not settle for my kin alone. The factory upriver is allowed to dump its tailings into the current, and it pollutes everything. The fish, the clams, the beams that support the village, the village people. He wanted this whole place to wither and die for…defiance. Or simply because he was spiteful.”

Toph swallows again, and she’s glad she can’t see it. Just hearing about it is horrible enough.

“I’m sorry.” Zuko says quietly, and Toph grips the wooden beam hard enough to bruise her own fingers, Would they stop sneaking up on her! Hello, little blind girl!

“You are not responsible for what your grandfather has done, Prince Zuko.” Kotone says, though her tone is still cold.

“Aren’t I?” He asks, and his voice is hard too.

 _Ah man_ , Toph thinks. _This is all just so messed up_!


	16. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, you probably would have loved a super long chapter....but i cut it in half to maintain my word count average. Also, because the second half is taking longer get how i want it.

Aang looks…. _better_ , Zuko thinks. His eyes weren’t so hollow, his pallor not so sickly, and he’d stopped trembling, finally, as he tip-toed his way across the narrow bar of the railing without a care in the world for the fall.

Yan Hui had scrounged him up a guardsman’s trainee uniform, though it still hung a little loose. Firebenders could enlist in formal military training at the age of thirteen, just as they could fight an Agni Kai and take up lordship of their clan, if necessary, but most thirteen year old Firebenders just weren’t quite so…small. The twelve year old was a wisp of a child.

For that matter, so was the little earthbender. Zuko really rather felt bad for letting her come, given that she’d been miserably sick the whole trip. She reminds him too much of Azula most of the time, but even Azula had never seemed so small and fragile as Toph does at that moment, pale and shaky and clinging to the siding like a panda-lemur kit clinging to its mother for dear life.

He even feels bad enough that he offers her his hand when they disembark, sidled up to an abandoned dock east of Jang Hui itself. He can see the village down the river, crumbling rooftops and rotting pilons stubbornly rising up over sludge-ridden, reeking water. Aang looks at the water and hunches in on himself, and Zuko felt sick too, not just for the reek, but in his bones. This place was spirit touched, and he could feel it, and it felt _wrong_. Corrupt.

He regrets, immediately, his offer of a hand, as lady Toph has the strongest grip of anyone he’s ever crossed paths with. He winces, and she offers him one of those dreadful grins, though its effect is somewhat lessened by the cold sweat clinging to her brow, and the still sickly cast to her face. “Thanks, Sparky.” She huffs as they touch the ground, and then she mercifully releases him so that she can drop down and dig her fingers into the grass and earth. Nearby, Aang is distracted from the polluted river by a butterfly, and chases after it, trying to get it to land on his fingers. The sunshine has brought a little color back to his sallow face, and Zuko feels a cold, dark knot form in his stomach, at the idea of leading Aang back down into his prison and leaving him there.

Again.

“Prince Zuko, Avatar Aang.” Captain Kotone calls their attention. Aang pouts after his butterfly, but come back, skipping towards Zuko’s side. They follow Kotone down the bank, away from the reeds and towards a half-moon bank in the rivers edge, with a stone jutting out of the center. Except, as they walk closer, Zuko realizes it isn’t a stone. It’s a statue, mired and caked with the same muck that chokes the river, but a statue nonetheless, of a woman in veils, her hands held out to either side. A shrine, for the Painted Lady. Kotone halts at the edge of the water. It’s brown and oily, and smells foul, even in the shallows. Zuko looks unhappily at the captain, and receives an affirming nod.

“Nng.” Zuko groans, accepts the offering box from Kotone, and wades in. The filth immediately seeps into his pants and his boots, oozing around his feet, cold and viscous. It pulls at him, unnaturally, for how shallow and weak the current is.

“Um…do I have to?” Aang whines a little, tippie-toed at the waters edge.

“I’d advise it.” Kotone says, without an ounce of sympathy. Easy for her, Zuko thinks. _She’s_ not the one who has to get wet.

“Ew.” Aang mutters quietly, taking high, mincing steps until he all but flops into Zuko. Zuko shuffles, praying blindly that they don’t fall over, until they both manage to regain their balance. Zuko glances down at the top of Aang’s head, and Aang peeks up, shrugging apologetically. Zuko sighs and opens the offering box.

In one of the statue’s hands, he places a small sachet of rice and smoked fish, and in the other, he places the incense, which he lights with a white spark. Aang sucks in a sharp breath and holds it. Zuko eyes him warily, and the shrine, and waits.

Small whisps of lavender smoke coil up from the incense, the soft floral scent lost completely under the stench.

“Um…” Aang shifts a bit, grimacing at the squelch of oily mud under his feet. “How long do you think we…?” He reaches out, to brush lichen off the brim of the statues hat, and the moment his fingers touch the shrine, it glows white, and the Avatar’s tattoos glow a blinding blue.

Zuko flinches and staggers back, trying to shield himself, but there is no onslaught, no sudden wrecking of spiritual fury.

He opens his eyes, and gasps.

The river is sparkling and clear, cheerily reflecting sunlight, and a sprawling river-town lies downstream, a marvel of delicate bridges, sloping rooftops, and brightly painted window screens. Fish leap from the water, and children laugh, jumping off docks and sending up white sprays.

“Wow…” Aang breathes excitedly. “Is that….?”

“Shiromizu.” Someone answers. “A lifetime ago, though it lost its name…along with everything else.”

Both boys whirl around, and where Kotone had stood, now stands a taller woman, with painted skin and a flowing dress. Red tongues of fire, and a silver crescent moon – Agni and La.

Her eyes, however. Her eyes are wrong. They are not the gold-in-blue of legend, but rather the same oily brown as the ruined river itself.

“Lady Tsuruko.” Zuko bows, and Aang is quick to copy him. “Painted Lady, ma’am.” The airbender blurts.

“The Dragon Prince,” The spirit acknowledges them. “And the young Avatar.” She looks between them curiously, and parts the veil that shades her face with one hand. She’s younger than Zuko would have expected. She couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Kotone, when she was executed. Or maybe spirits didn’t work that way. Maybe they only reflected the best of what you were in life. Or the worst, depending on your fate.

“Not that I am not honored, “She says, “but what could those whose fate begets the fate of the world want from me? I am only a river, and I am fading.”

Zuko and Aang shared a glance, Aang shooting his eyebrows up expectantly, which wasn’t at all fair, Zuko thought. It was the Avatars job to mediate with the spirits, after all.

“We are not here, for the river, Lady Tsuruko. We are here for the Painted Lady of Shiromizu, with a daughter of your lineage as our guide.” Zuko says, carefully measuring his words. She may have been human once, but spirits who became other things – a river, for example – they could forget what it meant to be human, and they could take offense for human fallacy. And you never, ever, wanted to offend a powerful spirit, and sickly or not, Shiromizu held power.

“I was who you seek, once.” She says, looking beyond them, to the floating mezzanine of the past. “What do you seek her for?”

Zuko wets his lips, and puts a hand on Aang’s shoulder, to stop the boy fidgeting. “You were there, when everything changed. We were told you could tell us...why. Please.”

“You do not know?” She asks curiously, looking honestly baffled at the both of them. “It is your story.”

“But we don’t know it.” Aang pipes up, looking unusually serious. “Please. We need to know. Why did Sozin…the world is so broken, why did he-“

“Sozin did not break the world.” Lady Tsuruko says sharply. “Who told you that?” The water around them roils, but doesn’t pull, though it makes Zuko incredibly uneasy. _He’s_ not a waterbender.

Aang glances uneasily at Zuko.

“It’s history.” Aang says.

“It’s wrong.” Lady Tsuruko replies, with the cutting finality of one who is certain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, some notes i probably should have added chapters and chapters ago. The clan names i've created.   
> Anbawan = Amber Bay  
> Youkekuma = Dawn Cloud  
> Shiromizu = White Water  
> Karedura = Caldera


	17. Chapter 16

“But….”Aang says.

“Sozin believed as you did.” She cuts him off once more, brisk and clear as her great granddaughter was. “That the world was broken, and that it could be made whole. He came to us…”

The world spins, and Zuko holds tight to Aang, afraid to lose him in the spirit world, but they are not wrenched apart. In fact, they don’t seem to move at all, and neither does the Painted Lady.

They were in a water garden, like no water garden Zuko had ever seen. Hemmed in by vegetable terraces and pots of bright flowers. The river flowed under open squares, with the occasional silver flash of fish, and mosaic benches sat in pleasantly shaded corners.

“I am sorry we cannot offer you more, Lord Sozin.” Lady Tsuruko murmured, and Zuko twitched, turning away from the spirit and towards the memory of her younger self. Her skin was painted, and her eyes were bright, and she wore a flowing dress that matched her flowing hair. This was not the spirit, nor the healer. This was the wife of the Lord of Shiromizu. “We are delighted to welcome you, but we were caught very much by surprise. My lord husband is still away-“

“I did not come for your lord husband.” Fire Lord Sozin rasps, coughing a little as he speaks. He’s old. So very old. His skin is spotted with age, and his hair has thinned. His figure is still proud, still imposing, but he walks arm in arm with the young woman, and she is the one supporting him.

Zuko never imagined that his great grandfather could have been…frail.

The young Lady Shiromizu looks surprised, but covers it quickly. Like another waterbender Zuko knows, her face is very expressive.

“Then how may I serve, Lord Sozin?” She inquired, helping him settle onto a bench. His breathing wheezes, and it takes a minute for him to gather the breathe to speak again.

“Tell me about your people, Lady Tsuruko.” The Fire Lord demands.

“Our people are prospering, Lord Sozin. It has been a good summer, which is just as well, for how many children were born this past year-“

“No.” Sozin snaps. “ _Your_ people.”

Gold-in-blue eyes widen.

“He wanted to know what the rest of the world was truly like.” The Painted Lady says, and the memory-place fades like a dream, and they find themselves standing in the river again. “Some believe that Lord Sozin was spirit-touched, like the great Fire Lord Kazue. That the great spirits showed him a vision in his youth that drove him for the rest of his life. We knew little of the other nations. To us, they were little more than stories of strangers in strange lands, even then. But…in our home, the world was made whole. The balance was perfect.” She sounds like she might weep, or scream. She sounds human.

“Magma benders and water healers and air messengers used to join the islands together.” The world swept away again, and they could _see_ it.

Eruptions turned aside by Firebenders and Earthbenders, working together to save a village. Waterbenders pushing back the tsunami, and pulling brine from drowned lungs. Airbenders with parcels rigged to their backs, diving through the sky side by side with dragonriders, racing ahead of the storm with words of warning.

“He wanted that for the world. He saw all four elements in perfect harmony, and he believed. He _believed_ it was ordained. Why else would the spirits grant him the Avatar as his best friend, if not to bring about this grand union?”

“But what happened to them?” Aang demands.

She looks at the young avatar, with her eyes the color of decay. “You did.” She murmurs. “Or, _Roku_ did.”

“ _What_?” Aang gasps and Zuko hisses, disbelieving. She shakes her head, wry and otherworldly.

“Do you not know the real tragedy of our time, young one?” She inquires, and it is not quite kind, the way she addresses him, and it makes Zuko grip Aang’s shoulder and pull him closer, prepared to protect him if he has to. “It is that the Avatar has failed.”

“To…stop Sozin?” Aang asks weakly, leaning into Zuko for comfort.

“To bring balance to the world.” The Painted Lady says. “To do as Sozin wanted to. Roku failed this task. Kyoshi failed it. Kuruk failed it. Yangchen…the last Air Avatar, she came close, and she stopped too shy. And that is where it truly began. This war that has consumed your world.”

“But that was before the war.” Aang says. “That was before…well, it was a really, really long time ago. It was before everything!”

“It was.” She says, as clipped and unimpressed as Kotone on any day. “But it still matters. There was great conflict, in the time before Yangchen, not between the elements, but among spirits and mortals. It was her life’s work to achieve peace, and she achieved it, and believed that achieving peace was enough.”

The Painted Lady looks to Zuko, and he can feel her stare down to his marrow. He knows. He _knows_.

“But what’s wrong with that?” Aang asks. “Peace is good!”

“I did not say it was wrong, young one. I said it was _not enough_.” The spirit chides him. “For while Yangchen ended the conflict, she did not mend the bond between the spirits and the world, and she did not foster that peace into unity. And Kuruk after her….Kuruk faced no such great challenge, and he was not a peaceful soul. So where no challenges existed, he made them. He challenged any bender from any nation, and, being the Avatar, he _always_ won. Imagine, child, the most powerful bender in the world, making sport of any person he wished.”

Aang looks slightly guilty, which he shouldn’t, because while Kuruk was the Avatar, he wasn’t Aang, but he also looks a little lost. And Zuko gets it, he does. Aang was a temple child. He wouldn’t understand that kind of imbalance, Avatar or no Avatar. But Zuko, Zuko understands exactly how people must have felt.

“They must have hated him.” Zuko says, and Aang flinches.

“Many did, and many were glad when the cycle moved on.” The Painted Lady says. “But the debts of one life are not always forgiven in another. Kuruk’s actions strained the peace Yangchen had brought, creating resentment both against the Avatar, and between the nations, for each blamed the other for not bringing him to heel. He flaunted his power and his position, and Kyoshi was judged for that from the moment she herself was declared his successor. And so Kyoshi chose her own people over the world, and she believed that that was as it should have been. That each nation must look to its own, and that while the Avatar may mediate between all four elements, the elements themselves must remain divided. That was _her_ philosophy of balance, and as Roku was meant to guide you, that is what wisdom she laid down when it was her turn to guide Roku.”

“If he was raised in the islands, among a people comprised of _all_ elements, how could he believe that?” Zuko asks, free hand clenched tightly. He can't bend fire here, in the spirit realm, but he feels like he could burn his own soul nonetheless.

“When he was a younger man, as you are now, he did not.” She replies. “But his journey as the Avatar changed him, and his beliefs, greatly. He found teachers and friends, among the other elements, but he also found resentment, suspicion, and discord. The Earth Kingdoms trusted no one, not even each other. No one trusted the Air Nomads, who had distanced themselves too far from the world – “ Aang opens his mouth to protest, but she quells him with a fathomless look “ and the Fire Nation and the Water Tribes hated each other equally, and often clashed with violence when they met on the open sea.”

“But that’s not what I remember!” Aang blurts out, angry and childishly refusing to believe. “And if everyone just…just _hated_ each other, how could they have all just gotten along on the Fire Islands? Wouldn’t they hate each other there too!?” Aang demands.

“A _people_ does not a _person_ make. As a whole, these statements are by and large true, young one, but every spirit follows its own heart, and finds its own path. And whether they wished to or not, they could not simply ignore each other. Fur and whale-oil were needed from the poles, spices and ore from the islands, textiles and crops from the kingdoms, couriers and teachers from the temples. Discord aside, commerce marches on the world over.” She says, and Zuko snorts.

“Some of those peoples came to the Fire Nation on trade ships, but many of them came by chance. The Fire Nation took in the shipwrecked and the storm-lost, they saved the drowning and the stranded, and many strangers stayed with those that saved their lives. And once they were here, Avatar Aang, they were _ours_.” The spirit ripples, for just a moment, but for just a moment, the river spirit isn’t a veiled woman, the river spirit is a dragon, silver and red and touched by fire.

“Waterbender, Earthbender, Airbender – they were still _Fire_.”

“But Roku didn’t believe that.” Zuko comments. “He wouldn’t have, if he truly thought the elements were meant to be divided.”

“Of those already in his homeland, he neither approved nor disapproved, but when Sozin went to him, to speak of his grand vision of a unified world…his refusal went beyond philosophy. There was almost a fury, in his reaction to the mere suggestion, and I believe now that that fury was fueled, as all angers truly are, by fear.

“He feared war.” Zuko says harshly. _And in fearing it, he made it happen._

“He did.” She acknowledges, Aang’s head whipping back and forth between them as they speak. “The first colonies Sozin built were peacefully implemented, in territory no Earth Kingdom inhabited. And when Roku discovered them, he tore them down.”

The world doesn’t shift, but they can hear the snapping of great beams, and the crash of sliding earth.

“Sozin would not try again while Roku lived.” She told them. “But he was haunted by this vision he saw, and the desire to see it through consumed him, body and mind. It is why he eventually came for _you_ , young one.” She gestures to Aang, who flinches at the memory of the death of his people. “Because the avatar alone could stop him, and he believed you would.”

“But what happened to our people?” Zuko demands. “Sozin slaughtered the Air Nomads and started this war, but this isn’t – there is no unity here! We’ve decimated the other nations!” _And…and ourselves_.

“Sozin did not long live past that act, and even then I was not certain it was he who gave that order. He wanted the Avatar….he had no need for anyone else. A broken cycle would not serve his purpose at all.” She tells them.

“If Sozin didn’t give the order…”Zuko tenses, mind racing, old wounds aching. “Then Azulon did.” _Grandfather._ Sozin had died long before Zuko was born, but Azulon had been kind to him, once upon a time. Azulon had been…

“Sozin wanted to unite the world. Azulon …..wanted to conquer it. He saw his father suffer all his life, because the Avatar chose the world over them. He grew bitter, and in his bitterness he did not share his father’s belief, that power came from all four elements. He believed that fire was the superior element, that they could be stronger than any other, than even the avatar, and he gouged and gouged at the divide, so brutally that he tore his own people apart, and the world after them.”

Zuko is used to disappointment, to resignation, to guilt and shame, and so it is too familiar a feeling, as the truth sinks in.

“He butchered our own people, just to prove he was powerful.” Zuko whispers hoarsely, looking down. _Like Ozai after him_.

The Painted Lady tilts her head, studying Zuko, as if she thinks he doesn’t really know why he’s here. As if she thought him foolish. “He _tried_.” She murmurs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure i like how this part turned out, but...i'm really trying to get this story rolling into the endgame, so...progress. Also, this segment is now going to be three chapters. This is a really freaking long conversation. O.o


	18. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the one hand, another chapter -

Aang proves to be getting quicker on the uptake, on the importance of what people don’t say. He sucks in a sharp breath before Zuko manages to jerk his gaze back up.

She smiles, a dragons sort of smile.

 _This_ , Zuko thinks. _This is why I’m here_. _This is what I need to know_.

He’d been wondering. Knowing what really happened, who was truly at fault, that was important, but at this point, it was too late to be useful _now_. Later, maybe, once they finally stopped the war, but it wouldn’t do much good to actually make the war end. Sozin, Azulon…it didn’t matter which of them did it, but what happened after…

“Tell me. Tell us. Please.” Zuko breathes, stepping forward with hope. _Tell me they aren’t all dead. Tell me not all is lost._

She turns her head, her gaze glittering, and slowly falling to Aang, the corners of her mouth still turned up.

“What is the saying…?” She asks thoughtfully, voice full of mischief and mirth and the jubilant hiss of bloody victory. “Gold and grey for sun and smoke?”

Zuko blinks, thrown. Is she talking about their eyes? What does that have to do with –

“Grey was already almost as common as noble gold.” She murmurs. “It was so easy to make people forget that gold was for fire, and grey only ever came from the storm.”

 _From the storm_ , Zuko thinks, _from_ …

The world wavers, and Aang jerks, looking up at him with wide eyes. Grey eyes. _Airbenders_ eyes…

“But they’re not…they’re…they _can’t_ be. Not all of them. We’d notice. Airbenders aren’t – you can’t just _hide_ that!” Zuko blurts out, trying and failing to control his breathing, and the pitch of his voice. Aang took hold of his hand, gripping hard and chewing his lip, looking hopeful and trying not to look hopeful.

“Every child born of the temples was an airbender, true. You can’t come into the world in such a place of spiritual power and not carry the spirits touch within you. But not every child of an airbender was an airbender, not the whole world over.” The Painted Lady tells him.

 _But some of them had to be_. Zuko thinks, heart racing. _How was it we didn’t notice_?

“Was it…” Aang starts quietly. “Was it just…just the ones born here?” Aang asks, looking up at the tall woman somberly.

The vicious curl of her smile softens, and her veils drift as she shakes her head.

“We are not all of us monsters, child. The order was given, and the Fire Lord had to be obeyed, but…mothers and children, monks and old men. Some just looked the other way, just for a moment, and others…there are places on a ship were even the loudest wails can’t be heard, and no marine ever served that couldn’t smuggle something or other past his or her commanders.” She tells them. Zuko wants to sit down, to think ,to feel relieved, but his head is spinning, and he doesn’t want to wind up soaking wet. “It wasn’t enough, child, not nearly, for what was lost, but…it was _something_.”

 _It was…it was everything_ , Zuko thought.

“Azulon knew, of course. For years after he realized that they had failed to slay the avatar, he believed that we had smuggled out _you_.” She says, and Aang gulps. “Among all the rest.”

“How did you hide them?” Zuko asks, voice raspy.

“With help, and…luck. It was sheer irony that ill will favored us.” She says. “The hurricane season that followed that genocide was the worst anyone alive had ever seen. But…there was fortune there. People were displaced, records were lost. Who was to say which families had only two children, or three? Who was to say how many people lived in that little village up the mountain, whose very foundations slid into the sea? There were so many orphans, and so few distant relatives. Even years later, the sages were forced to take us all at our word that this child was this couples, that this girl was her cousin, and that this man was that young ladies betrothed. The Lord of Youkekouma already had a grey eyed wife, it was no surprise to discover she had more than a handful of grey eyed nieces and nephews, or they might have four or five grey eyed sons and daughters, in need of shelter in the aftermath, and who was he refuse? They were kin, after all.” She shakes her head, as if still begrudgingly amused at the audacity of it.

Zuko feels stricken and foolish. It was before him his entire life and he never even saw it. _Ty Lee_. Ty Lee the acrobat. Ty Lee the chi blocker. Ty Lee who reads aura’s and never, ever, wanted to go underground.

 _She can’t be an airbender. She has to be_. His thoughts raced around and around and around.

“Still,” The Painted Lady continues, voice less pleased. “It did not save all of them. There were…accidents. Some simply disappeared, and Azulon…” She shakes her head, looking vicious.

“The airbenders hid, and hid well, but when Azulon could not have them, he came for the rest of us. The magma-benders…very few if any of them escaped the fires, that I ever knew of. Wildfires, we were told, just as we were told to let them burn, as they burned whole villages to the ground.”

The sudden rage of fire around them makes them flinch, and Aang staggers back, far more afraid of fire than Zuko. Sand turns under their feet, and once the rage of heat and light settles a little, Zuko startles a second time. They are standing on a beach, watching trees and houses burn in a roar, and Zuko recognizes that beach. This was Ember Island. This was where he had played as a child. The fire is loud, too loud, but he thinks he can still hear someone screaming, and maybe, just maybe, a dragons distant roar.

 _Agni…_ Zuko prays, feeling like a frightened child. _Agni, how could we have…_

The memory fades around them, but Zuko can still see the fire behind his eyes, consuming houses, crawling up the rope of a childs swing, breaking through rooflines and windows…

“I knew he would come for us next, no matter how useful we tried to be.” The Painted Lady continues, not as stricken by this terrible history as they are. How could she be? She’d already lived through it. “My people I sent east, and they live there still. They are not well known, and they are not as they were, but the water-that-was-fire still lives within them. That was _my_ victory. The one thing Azulon could not take from me.”

“Wait…the _Foggy Swamp_?” Aang blurts out, looking outraged. Zuko peers down at him, baffled, and the Painted Lady nods her assent. “But I met those guys! They were _weird_.”

“You should not judge, little avatar. They are your kin, as well as mine.” She retorts. Aang flushes.

“I laughed in his face when Azulon came to me.” Lady Tsuruko murmurs, like it is an odd detail she’s only just remembered. “I suppose that’s why I earned a _public_ execution.

“Tell me where they are! Tell me where you’ve sent them, you _witch_!” Azulon snarls, a much younger man than Zuko remembers, his face almost unrecognizable for its youth, and Zuko whips around, placing himself, foolishly, between Aang and the man’s mere illusion.

They are on the docks, and Zuko can see people hiding behind their window screens, as the Lord and Lady of Shiromizu stand regally before the Fire Lord, as he all but froths with his rage.

“You can’t have them.” The lady smiles. “ _Any_ of them.”

Aang gasps and flinches back, bumping into Zuko, when the hard crack of a sharp backhand snaps through open air and the lady reels back, landing bruised on the wooden planks. Even in memory, even through paint, Zuko can see the scald on her skin, from the heat of the hand that struck her.

“Tsuruko!” The lord gasps, dropping down beside his wife, before the Fire Lord grabs him by the shoulder and throws him off. Tsuruko makes a hard sound when Azulon kicks her, throwing her body over. She tries to push herself to her feet, and the people hiding behind their screens have stopped hiding. The Fire Lords guards mill uneasily, forming a barrier.

“The world will not bend to you, _Azulon_! None of us will!” Lord Shiromizu growls, forced to his knees by an Imperial Guard.

“If it will not bend,” Azulon snarls. “then it will _burn_. As will _you_.”

“You won’t find him.” Tsuruko slurs, standing and wiping clean a bloody lip. “The Avatar.”

“What do you know of the Avatar?” He demands, moving away her husband and back towards her, like a jabbed lion-dog, turning on anyone who caught his attention.

“I know _nothing_.” She laughs, hair falling in loose disarray. She looks young and proud and like she knows she is defeated. “And you, Lord Azulon, neither do you.”

Zuko recognizes the form, as the Fire Lord whirls, and grabs Aang, covering his eyes with an arm, but the vision fades before lightning crashes into the world.

Zuko is starting to feel sea-sick, with the way everything simply shifted like mist.

“He overstepped, when he murdered my family, all but my eldest daughter, away in Shu Jing. The accidents and the disappearances and the…wildfires may have drawn whispers, but they were _only_ whispers. The other lords and ladies did more than whisper, when they discovered what happened to us. A public execution is poorly disguised as anything else, and supposed treason or not, he obliterated my clan down to the children. It was not to be done, not even by the Fire Lord. It was not to be borne.”

“I’m sorry.” Aang says, sincere and sympathetic.

“I have shed my tears,” She says. “I can rest without having you spill yours.”

Aang bows, but scrubs at his face nonetheless. He’s a compassionate soul, and he doesn’t have Zuko’s bitter resistance to tears.

“He moved more quietly, after that, more carefully, but he never truly stopped. He turned on the dragon-riders next. The great tradition of dragon-slaying, he called it.”

Zuko shudders.

Dragons were fire made flesh, Agni’s first children. Even as a child in school, he’d been horrified when he was taught of the practice.

“But…the dragons were fire-benders too. Why…why turn on them?”

“He turned on anyone who denied him, child.” The Painted Lady says. “And the dragons _denied_ him. They refused to fly to the temples, when the order was given. They refused to let the wildfires burn. They refused to hunt Azulons prey, and that, Azulon could not stand, nor could he let it stand. If Agni’s first children acted against him, then perhaps _Agni himself_ …or at least, those were the rumors that began. Though they were also often the last rumors those sages ever entertained. In the beginning, Azulon…” She shakes her head, lost of faith. “I think he believed, once, that he was going to make the world better. But the more power he got, the more he wanted, and the more of the world he took….the less of it he cared for. It no longer mattered if you were fire-nation or foe. It only mattered if you bent to his will, or if you did not.”

Zuko wrestles with himself a moment. He’d wrestled with certainty before, wondering iF Azulon would have had him killed. For no other reason than to quiet Ozai’s pride. At one point, he’d been certain the answer was no…but…

Did it all matter so little? All their lives, hanging in the balance?

“Kuzon saved the dragons.” Zuko blurts out, when the thought crosses his mind, a distraction as well as a fact. He doesn’t want to linger on his own doubts, on his own insecurities. He can’t afford to. Aang looks crestfallen, and the statement cheers him. Of that one thing, Zuko is certain. If the one thing Kuzon wanted above all others, enough to bend to a man he despised, enough to survive heartbreak and hatred, was to see dragons fly, then he _knew_ , without doubt, that the dragons were still alive.

 “Kuzon saved more than that.” The Painted Lady bends slightly, praising and full of respect. “And survived.” She adds, with a touch of wryness.

“What about…the Order of the White Lotus?” Aang inquires. “They must have helped too! Right?”

“Oh. Them.” She doesn’t roll her eyes, in the exact same way in which Kotone doesn’t roll her eyes. “They are not, I think, what you might hope them to be, young Avatar. Or at least, they weren't in my time.” She sighs.

“Oh. Um…why?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- on the other hand, i am still working on this conversation. Why on earth did i write a fic that has so much backstory?


	19. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So happy i got this one rolled out! Enjoy!

“In times past, it was the duty of the Order of the White Lotus to curate the relics which were used to identify each new avatar, to either become or find teachers for each new avatar, and to maintain the written record and history of the Avatar. It was their way that membership was passed from master to apprentice, and the duties transferred from nation to nation as the cycle moved on. Yet, while they claimed one title as the Order of the White Lotus, in essence there were four, just as there were four nations and four elements. They crossed paths, and they interacted, but they never truly managed to break the barrier that existed between the four peoples. One Order maintained the record of the Avatars of the Water Tribes, one the Air Nomads, one the Fire Islands, and one the Earth Kingdoms. It lacked cohesion and had the barest of coordination. It was, in truth, rather bias.”

“But…that doesn’t sound like what Iroh said they were…” Aang says, scratching his head.

“What they are today is something else entirely.” The Painted Lady says. “For the last one hundred years, there was no avatar, and any mention of the Avatar…what records the Fire Sages did not claim for their own have either been hidden beyond all scouring, or been destroyed.”

“Oh. I guess…I guess that makes sense.” Aang says quietly, looking down at his toes. Zuko catches himself about to cross his arms, about to hunch in on himself in guilt, and forces it away. “It’s just, well, Iroh said I’ve already met a lot of members of the White Lotus, and they’ve been helping me. Well, most of them. “Aang frowns. “I think. There was Master Pakku, my waterbending teacher, but he didn’t really like me, and he really didn’t like Katara…she had to fight him to get him to let her learn waterbending!” Aang brightens a bit at the memory, and Zuko frowns.

 _Let_ her learn? Bending was a birthright!

“And King Bumi! I knew him from…from when we were _both_ kids! But he put me through a really hard test, and…and he wouldn’t teach me earthbending, even though he was my friend. Then there was Jeong Jeong…that went…really badly…”

“Stop.” Zuko says, slashing a hand and then crossing his arms, frustrated. “King Bumi, the strongest earthbender in Omashu, Jeong Jeong the Deserter, and…”

“Master Pakku.” Aang chirps helpfully. “He was the most elite waterbending master in the whole Northern Water Tribe.”

“And Uncle Iroh….” Zuko adds, realizing. “…. _and_ Lord Piandao.” Not to mention the two elder Fire Sages, but…

 _The strongest Earthbender in the Earth Kingdoms_ (if one _doesn’t_ count Toph Beifong, given _her_ reputation), _the most elite Waterbender in the Northern Water Tribe, two of the greatest Firebenders alive, and the best swordsman in the world_ …

“What.” Zuko _does not_ scream. “Where. They. Waiting. for? _They_ \- _Uncle_. He’s not – Ozai’s _not_ that powerful. He _can’t_ be.”

“You’ve seen it then.” The Painted Lady nods her approval. “What Kuzon and I saw long ago. They are exactly where and who they need to be, and yet…they _will not_ act.”

“Me.” Aang jumps in, answering a question Zuko has already dismissed having asked. “They were waiting for _me_. For the Avatar.” He looks up at Zuko, eyes wide and seeking comfort, seeking the reassurance that he doesn’t have to fight, doesn’t have to save the world, even though…even though everyone is telling him that it should be him, that it needs to be him.

“They’ll do without.” Zuko says sharply. “It’s not your job, Aang. It’s not your responsibility.”

“It is the fate of the world.” The Painted Lady reminds them, and Zuko snarls at her, which only brings a spark to her eye.

“Then let the world deal with.” Zuko says, but he already knows what he really means is this; _Let_ me _deal with it_.

“In that, Dragon Prince, we are agreed.” She smiles, and Zuko nods wearily. He feels….thin. It’s that same bright, flimsy quality, that hollowness everything took on when he was living on the sharp edge of hunger.

They’ve been in the Spirit World too long. He grabs Aang’s shoulder, and Aang jumps a little.

“Thank you, Lady Tsuruko no Shiromizu.” Zuko says, bowing. Aang bows with him. “Thank you, Painted Lady, ma’am.”

“You are welcome, young Avatar-“

Zuko could feel the muck in his boots again, and the cloying chill of his legs, nearly numb, and smell the awful reek. Aang shoulder was thin against his hand, and everything was slow to become real, and then it was, all at once –

 _White_.

.

.

.

… _A blizzard on the top of the world, cold, so cold….he couldn’t even feel it anymore, he was just tired…._

_“Sleep nephew. A man needs his rest.”_

_I have a duty to my people – I have a duty to me people –_

“I’m sorry.” She says. “That was not…gentle. I had only a moment.”

White. _Blinding_ white, like he’s standing in thick fog, and the fog is shining. Like sun-blindness off a field of ice-sheeted snow.

Everything’s hazy, too close and too far away. “Aang? Where is he?” Zuko demands.

“I could not reach the Avatar, but you…” She humms a pleasant sound. “You’ve opened your spirit to me before. You’ve prayed, and…you _believed_ in me, and that gave me strength.”

“Princess…Yue?” Zuko asks haltingly. _La_.

“My people are forgetting my name, but you remember it.” She says softly, and Zuko can almost see her now, like a shadow on glass. “It helps…helps me remember what it meant to have been…human.”

“I’m sorry.” Zuko says.

“I know.” She replies. “You tell me that every time you look up at the moon.”

Zuko can feel himself redden. That was actually…really awkward.

 _\- Zuko_?! –

Zuko whips around, not sure who he heard, or where they called out to him from.

“I don’t have much time.” Yue says. “Neither do you. Events are coming to pass, and the timing can change everything. There’s an eclipse coming.” She whispers. He feels like she’s standing right in front of him, and yet he _can’t see her_. “The tide rises, and the tide falls. You have to decide who gets taken by the wave.”

A hand lays over his brow, and Zuko can see the twilight of a sky darkened at midday, and he _knows_ when it will happen. He knows the day and the hour and the _moment_.

“Thank you.” Zuko says. “But why?”

“You’re a prince who wants to save his people, Zuko.” She smiles, and he can almost see it, can almost look into her eyes. She’s so close, and yet so far beyond his reach. “I’m just a princess who wants to save mine. We can do both. I believe you can do both.” She laughs, carefree and otherworldly. “I believe in you too.”

“I-“

“And I’m sorry, about your friend.” She says. The light starts to fade.

“My friend?” Zuko questions, and all at once finds himself standing in the river. His vision swims, lightheadedness taking him, and he sways, staggering in the foul water.

“Zuko?” Aang calls, voice full of a tremulous worry, farther away than Zuko remembered him being before.

“Hey!” Toph shouts, the ground shaking with an impatiently stomped foor. “Help!”

 _Help_? Zuko lurches, and his gaze lands on his faithful captain, collapsed on the river-bank, limp and brutally pale.

“ _Kotone_!”


	20. Chapter 19

Zuko stares at the marks on his hand, still red and raw.

Between himself and Hisao, they’ve got the temperature in the room up to the level of Boiling Rock, but Kotone’s skin is still pale as shock.

He’d scrambled toward the riverbank and dropped to her side, and reached out to grab her-

It had burned, the touch of her skin. Like iron in frost.

Zuko cursed himself again and buried his fingers in his hair. It was never safe to touch a spirit. Even hosting the Painted Lady, who had once been flesh and blood kin, left its mark on her skin, in the tattoos now pressed there irreversibly, of red fire and a silver crescent moon, but Kotone was strong and the river was in her veins.

But Yue… _La_ , was a Great Spirit, and Kotone did not have an Avatar’s strength. She wasn’t waking up, and she was still so cold…

“What…what did she say?” Aang asks quietly, from where’s he’s perched on a stool in the corner. Nishi was lying next to Kotone, sharing her own body heat, now that her skin was safe to touch, and Toph was sitting on the end of the cot, Kotone’s feet propped in her lap, gripping the metal rim so hard Zuko swore he could actually see the metal crumpling under her fingers, no matter how impossible. Hisao and Zuko sat on either end of the room, putting off heat like living furnaces. “Yue?”

“There’s an eclipse coming.” Zuko says tiredly, not worried about that now.

“Um….” Aang looks like he wants to ask a question, and instead bites his lip, glancing nervously at Kotone.

“A firebender loses their connection with the sun, as it’s hidden behind the moon. The sky darkens, and for a few minutes or hours…we’re powerless.”

“Oh.” Aang says softly.

“Don’t worry about it.” Zuko sighs, dropping his hands from his hair. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Right.” Aang nods, fidgeting. “Um…how was she? Princess Yue?”

“She…” Zuko pauses. “She said her people are…forgetting her.”

“What?!” Aang yelps. “But she saved them! She _died_ to save them!”

“Not like that.” Zuko says, trying to find the right words. “It’s…they remember her, of course, but it’s like…alright.” Zuko pauses. “So she’s Yue, right? But she’s also La now. And her people worship Tui and La, but they forget that La is also Yue, and it’s…she suggested that it makes it hard for her to remember that she was human, once. I guess it’s like you, a bit, when you’re in the Avatar State. She’s there, but…it’s like she’s a whisper in the blizzard, and La is the storm.”

“That…almost kinda made sense.” Toph says bluntly. “But I’ll give you points for effort there, Sparky.”

“ _Toph_ …” Aang groans. “It’s not funny. It’s really sad! Princess Yue was a good person.”

“Yeah, I heard, but c’mon, she totally whammied our captain lady.” Toph shoots back, rubbing Kotone’s feet with one hand.

“I know, but she didn’t mean to hurt her, and the eclipse is probably really important!”

“Yeah, well, why didn’t she just visit him in a dream, huh?” Toph snaps. “Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?”

“Maybe she couldn’t!” Aang jumps to his feet. “You don’t know, maybe she was just trying her best, and-“

“ _Stop_ it!” Zuko raises his voice, and both twelve-year olds whips towards the sound. “This is a sick room. If you want to bicker because you’re stressed, do it outside!”

“I’m not stressed!” Toph insists, like there isn’t a neat row of small dents in the metal framework.

“Me neither!” Aang pipes in, shooting Toph a dirty look. Zuko wants to knock their heads together, the both of them. They’re so _immature_. “I’m just…worried, and Toph is being mean!”

“Hey!” Toph protests. “I’m not being mean, I’m just saying it like it-“

“I said stop it!” Zuko shouts, shooting sparks and flinching to catch them before he sets anything, or anyone, on fire. “Before I _order_ you both outside.”

“You’re not in charge of me!” Toph retorts.

“I’m the Avatar, you’re not in charge of me eith-“ Aang quails under Zuko’s glare. “Er…um…sorry.”

“Oh c’mon, why does everybody do that?” Toph crossed her arms, not quite pouting. “You get all serious and everybody just cowers and runs away. Seriously, the reek of nervous sweat when you’re in the assembly hall is _gross_. Are you scary-looking or something?”

The room falls completely silent, and Zuko gapes a little at the little earthbender before snapping his jaw shut. He’s not going to answer that, but one hand moves reflexively towards the scar across his face.

“Uh…he kinda is.” Aang mutters quietly, shooting Zuko an apologetic look.

“Huh.” Toph replies, tilting her head thoughtfully, blind eyes cast out to empty space. “I never would have guessed.”

There’s a soft snort, and it takes a beat for everyone to realize that it came from Kotone. Her lips twitch, and then she grimaces, looking pained.

“Captain!” Zuko says, lurching towards her and then backing away, because lunging at her while she’s half-dressed and abed is highly inappropriate.

“Prince Zuko.” Kotone murmurs, hands drifting up and down across the blankets in a searching self assessment.

“You’ve got four limbs, ten fingers, ten toes, two eyes, one nose, and a pretty mouth.” Nishi tells her quietly.

“And?” Kotone asks, tone clipped. She hasn’t yet managed to open her eyes.

Zuko winces. Aside from the vivid marks of the Painted Lady, her brief tangle with the Moon Spirit left her hair a shining white.

Which, Zuko supposed, was better than anything resembling koi fishiness. Still, she probably wasn’t going to be pleased.

“Prince Zuko?” Kotone queries again, a slight tremor in her voice, her fists clenching on the blankets. She shivers slightly.

“The Painted Lady is in your skin for all to see.” Zuko says, trying to sound clinical, trying to sound unaffected. “And your hair has turned white.”

“But it’s really pretty!” Aang chimes in, forcefully cheerful.

“Cold.” Kotone murmurs, sounding drowsy, and as if she didn’t hear them at all. “It’s really cold.”

“It’ll warm up.” Zuko promises, glancing at Hisao, whose sweat is rolling down his brow. He’s not alone. Toph looks very frizzy around the edges, and Aang’s borrowed uniform shirt is plastered to his neck. They share a determined nod, and Kotone settles a bit as the air roils hotter, drifting back off.


	21. Chapter 20

It’s barely evening as they return to the capitol, and Zuko entrusts Kotone to Nishi and Hisao, and Aang to Yan Hui. Toph, who does as she pleases, follows him, and he doesn’t quite have the heart to try and lose a blind girl as he makes his way back through the palace district.

“You know,” Toph drawls. “You feel pretty angry. Where are we going?”

“I am angry.” Zuko retorts, shortening his stride reluctantly because she’s not having the easiest time trying to keep up. “And I’m going to find my uncle.”

“Yikes.” Toph mutters, her feet slapping the ground too hard. Zuko can feel the cobbles shiver. “You know, I thought my family was bad, but you guys have really got issues.”

“Tell me about it.” Zuko growls.

“So…is this gonna be a quiet angry kinda thing or a loud angry kinda thing, cuz I can’t, you know, see it, but I’m pretty sure you’re putting off little fires there, Sparky.” Toph comments, her voice a little high, but that might be because they’re moving fast. Zuko doesn’t actually think she’s scared of him. He’s fairly certain she’s not scared of anyone.

Damn, she’s right. White fire curling over his knuckles, sparks skittering around his heels when he steps just so. He tries to will it back down, he tries, but it’s so difficult. He doesn’t know how his sister handles it, how she doesn’t just burn, all the time, if this is what it feels like. There’s no _end_ to it.

“I can’t say yet.” Zuko says honestly, and Toph snorts, not in a funny way.

The guards practically jump aside when they reach the palace, and Zuko thinks maybe Toph did have a point. Did he really scare people so badly?

“Where’s General Iroh?” Zuko stops a flustered looking maid, who nearly trips herself trying to bow.

“Th-the temple, Prince Zuko.” She stutters, and Zuko winces. He really, apparently, did scare people that badly. That’s not what he wanted.

“Thank you.” Zuko says, trying to sound less hostile. By the unimpressed look on Toph’s face as the maid scurries away, he doesn’t think he managed very well, but he’d like to see her try it when _her_ hands were literally on fire. It was starting to singe his sleeves.

 _Breathe_ , he reminds himself. _In. Out, Hold. In_ –

A vice-like grip catches his arm, that isn’t Toph’s, as they pass under an arched entryway, and Toph yelps when she runs right into Zuko’s back as he freezes. “Watch it, Sparky!”

“You’re going to hurt someone if you don’t bring that under control.” Kuzon growls gravely. For an old man whose hands shake when he sits down for tea, he’s as solid a stone.

“I don’t know how!” Zuko practically whines, frustrated and beyond angry. With Uncle. With the Order of the White Lotus. With his father. With _himself_.

“Foolish boy!” Kuzon hacks, coughing as he bodily marches Zuko back the way they came, Toph treading after them with a scrunched up expression, hiking her skirts up because Kuzon doesn’t bother to shorten or slow his stride.

He drags Zuko back through the palace district, towards the training grounds. People are beginning to light the lamps as darkness falls, and imperial patrols nod to them as they pass, though a sharp glare from the elder usually has any prying or curious gazes flinching away.

“Azulon’s rotten teachings….” Kuzon mutters blackly. “You think only of heat, and nothing of spirit, as if bending were a mental exercise.” Zuko stumbles a little over a loose cobble, and Kuzon carries him forward anyways. Toph has no such trouble, as the ground seems to even out before her stride.

“I’m not really _thinking_ at all!” Zuko mutters, frustrated. “If I could just think it and stop bending I would, I’m just-  it’s all _feeling_ , and it’s too much! I don’t know how to make it stop!”

“Of course you don’t.” Kuzon rumbles. “That’s not what they teach you to do, these days, though I could have hoped that your uncle would have at least _tried_. Bending is just as much a physical act as it is a _state of mind_. You think that white fire of yours is mere heat and focus? That’s your spirit you’re burning up there. That’s why it _hurts_.”

“My sister bends blue fire.” Zuko blurts, because he’s always thinking of it now, how he hurts, and how she must hurt more, to fuel such an inferno.

“Then may Agni watch over her soul.” Kuzon says gravely. “If you can’t learn to master it, you’ll burn hot and quick and your life will burn out.”

“Then help me.” Zuko pleads. “Help me.”

“That is exactly what I intend to do.” Kuzon looks at him, olive eyes piercing.

Kuzon slows as they reach the training grounds, but they don’t stop. He moves past them, and past the parade fields, and the public gardens, towards the edge of the caldera, and the small sulfur lakes that form there. The smell is strong, and Toph grumbles, her eyes watering.

There’s a fog here, as cooler evening air meets the warm steam from the lakes and a shiver runs up Zuko’s spine, prickling over his skin. There are stories of spirit mists, places where people disappear, where people forget themselves, and everyone and everything they ever knew. Zuko and Azula used to taunt each other with the darker spirit-tales, of the face-stealer and black fire and the Drowned, but it was always the mists that made them both shudder.

“This really isn’t helping me calm down.” Zuko mutters, wincing when his voice carries.

“Calm is worthless.” Kuzon mutters back. “You are a Firebender, calm cannot help you. It is not the objective we seek. You must learn _focus_.”

Zuko growls, irritated because that wasn’t helpful _at all_. Kuzon snorts, and Zuko can’t even see Toph under the fog, and he’s actually a little worried about that. He can hear her though, every precise, firm step she takes.

“Calm is a clear sky on a simple day.” Kuzon tells him. “Focus is the eye of the storm. You _are_ the storm, Prince Zuko.”

“But how do I push it away?” Zuko demands, trying really hard not to whine. He’s too old and in too dignified a position to be the kind of person who whines. No matter how much he wants to.

Kuzon scoffs, and Zuko wants to scream at him, or grab the old man and shake him till answers fell out.

“Uh…Sparky?” Toph’s voice rises out of the fog, with a little thread uncertainty in her tone. “What’s out there?”

“What?” Zuko pauses, turning towards the sound of her voice. It’s getting too dark, and the lanterns are far away now. It’s quiet out here, he realizes. The sot hiss and burble of water, the faintest sussurras of the breeze on the stone crags of the caldera’s edge, and…

Zuko has spent too long at sea to _not_ know that sound, that supple cut of movement through water, like a deadly orca-shark or a vicious tiger-seal, all sinew and teeth.

 _It’s a sulfur lake,_ Zuko thinks sharply _. Nothing lives in sulfur lakes. At least, nothing of this world._

“Are there spirits here?” Zuko asks warily. They’ve already had one brutal touch with spirits today, they don’t need another, not when Kotone was still so cold when they carried her off.

“You could call them ghosts,” Kuzon huffs amusedly, “but they are as real as you and I, Prince Zuko.”

 _This_ , Zuko thinks sourly, _is exactly why my sister sets people on fire_.

It’s moving towards them, and the lake laps. Zuko can hear it now, the throaty, deep exhale of something so very much bigger than them, and the weight of it dragging over sand, and his heart thunders.

Steam hisses when fire crackles off Zuko’s skin, and there is a gritty rasp, as a heavy paw lands on dry sand and stone, and Toph gasps. Her fingers find Zuko’s tunic and tug, and Zuko barely keeps himself from staggering into her. “Toph?” He questions, because all he can see in the flicker of his white fire is silver mist and shifting shadow, and maybe the glint of the water, but she can see far more than he ever could, with her blindness and her bending.

“Is that…” She whispers, sounding small. “Is that what I think it is?”

Zuko puts a hand carefully on her shoulder, white fire on his knuckles and his palms probably uncomfortably hot, but he doesn’t shake her and he doesn’t demand what she think it is, because he can hear it rising.

The fog falls away from gleaming scales and the wicked curve of teeth. Warm breath wafts over them, and lambent, shining gold eyes turn, and focus. A pale whisker reaches out, feathery soft, and Zuko just stares, frozen to his marrow.

“Yes.” Zuko breathes out, and Toph swallows tensely.

 _That’s a dragon_.


	22. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't give up on me, i'm still working on this.

“Nephew!” His uncle startles, spotting him, and Zuko, disheveled and exhausted and jittery still, as dawn creeps towards the caldera, just stares back at Iroh.

 _Did you really hunt them_? Zuko doesn’t ask. _How could we forget this_? He doesn’t ask. _Did you know I was hurting myself, burning like I did?And say nothing?_ He doesn’t ask.

“Why didn’t you take the throne?” He does ask, because that is what he needs to know. That is where he needs to place his focus, if he is to succeed, now that…now that he actually has a chance.

He almost grins to himself, with the elation of the mere memory of that first flicker of other-kind, against his mind, against his spirit, showing him the way.

“I had no heirs, and Azulon replaced me accordingly.” Iroh replies, after a quiet moment of surprise and unsettlement. Zuko’s stare turns sharp and frowning. Surely Iroh didn’t truly believe…

“Azulon wasn’t stupid.” Zuko states tersely. “Neither are you.”

“Nephew?” Iroh’s pensive expression turns dark, a formidable look on the Dragon of the West.

“What do you think happened after Lu Ten died? That grandfather replaced you and suddenly passed in his sleep? What do you think happened to my mother?” Zuko demands, irate and unbelieving that his uncle, who saw twists within turns, wouldn’t have seen this.

“It is said the lady Ursa struggled as Ozai’s wife. It was not entirely unexpected that she may have found being the wife of the Fire Lord too much.” Iroh says, regret on his tongue, but something hard in his gaze. “My father was old, and it was a stressful time. Grief can slay a man as easily as anything else.”

Not fooled, then. Willfully ignorant.

Zuko snarls, at the failure inherent in that, at everything they suffered, for that, and takes a riled step closer to Iroh, glowering down at him.

“Grief?” Zuko repeats, low and seething, like a volcano on the rise. “From _Azulon_?” It was laughable, bitter and wrong to even think. That was the man who murdered his own people, for reasons as pithy and fickle as pride and jealousy. And _spite_. “Ozai demanded that Azulon replace you, and Azulon _denied_ him.” Zuko hisses. “And so Ozai threatened my life, and my mother murdered the Fire Lord for him, and vanished, and you…you did _nothing_.” Zuko’s voice cracks. “Why didn’t you _take the throne_?” He demands.

“Zuko…” Iroh looks down, closing his eyes, every muscle tense, every line of his face deep and hard. He looked like a man at war with himself. Like an _old_ man at war with himself.

“Why?” Zuko demands, slightly less harsh. He’d never really considered Iroh as aged, with the implications of feebleness that came with it. Not once. Iroh was everything he had wanted to be – powerful, unbreakable, iron-willed and strong. He’d been annoying and aggravating and too self-indulgent, but never…never _failing_.

“I saw another path.” Iroh murmurs. “To end this terrible cycle, this terrible war. To return balance to the world, and it could not be achieved if I were to be crowned. I did not believe I would be able to turn back the tide of what we had wrought, even as Fire Lord. But with the Avatar-“

“You didn’t even try.” Zuko says bitterly, tiredly, cutting him off. “Everything he has done, and you didn’t even _try_.” Zuko feels defeated, with that knowledge. With the effort it takes to let go of a hope that had seen him through darkness and despair and danger.

“I have done what I believe has been necessary, to pave the way for a better future, and a better Fire Lord.” Says Iroh, voice hard, looking up at Zuko with determination and _pride_. “For the sake of the world, nephew-“

“You condemned our people.” Zuko says, hot and cold and numb. “You condemned _me_.”

“Do you still not see that a throne is not everything?” Iroh inquires flatly. “There is more to life than power, Zuko! I tried to show you –“

“I know that!”

“Yet all you strive for is the throne!” Iroh doesn’t raise his voice, but he does raise his temper. “Plotting and shifting among the court as your father had done-“

“I don’t want the throne!” Zuko snaps. “ _You_ were supposed to take it!”

Iroh blinks, stunned. “I cannot.”

Zuko lets out a breath, slumping all at once from towering over his uncle. “You _have_ to. If you don’t, then this is for nothing, everything I have done is for nothing.”

“Nephew, no.” Iroh shakes his head. “You have a good heart, and you have tried. But you must allow the Avatar-“

“The Avatar is a child!” Zuko growls, throwing his hands up in aggrievement. “I’m not allowing him to take on Ozai. That’s _insane_!”

“It is his destiny to restore balance!” Iroh declares thunderously.

“And it was _your_ responsibility to not let it grow so unbalanced in the first place! You could have stopped Ozai, stopped all of this, and you didn’t even try!” Zuko fumes, heat simmering off his skin, but his life no longer burning up in his hands. Though his heart might be. Agni, arguing with his uncle _hurts_.

“It is not my place.” Iroh states firmly, immutably, rooted to the ground like a mountain, as if Zuko were the howling wind. It’s a look he’s too familiar with. When Iroh insists that Zuko is too young and foolish, and should bow to greater wisdom.

“Take the throne.” Zuko demands, jabbing a sharp hand down between them with the force of his insistence.

“No.” Iroh shakes his head, in denial, in folly.

Zuko sucks in a sharp breath, tasting steam, turns, and walks away. The rising sun stings at the corner of his eye, bright and almost blinding, and chases blue shadows.

 _Fine_. Zuko thinks furiously. _If Iroh doesn’t want it, I know someone who does_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, i introduced dragons and then skimmed past them. We are going to get back to the dragons, don't worry, i just needed this scene to take place and i'm still flushing out how i'm going to....characterize.. i guess would be the term, the dragons in this story. So. Also, sorry this chapter was kinda short.


	23. Chapter 22

Azula wakes from an uneasy sleep, tense on her cot in the armored tank. The edges of the knife Zuko gave her bite into her hand, and she forces her fingers to relax as she listens, as she feels. Ty Lee is also awake, leaning up from her cot with a frown on her face that Azula can just barely make out in the dark, only a hint of moonlight filtering into the tank from the front viewport and the overhead hatch. Azula is sleeping in a metal container. She’s not going to trap herself in it.

“What is it?” Azula asks quietly, her words barely more than breath.

“Hmm.” Ty Lee cocks her head, delicately pulling herself up and off her cot. “I’m not sure.”

Azula scowls, and gets up, pulling on her armor without a thought. She trusted her own instincts and Ty Lee’s intuition – _something_ was up.

She’d at last established a firm foothold inside the outer wall, once they’d managed to get the supply lines through and additional troops arrived. She could keep a living barricade running day and night now, to hold off the earthbenders, without burning her troops to exhaustion.

Azula and Ty Lee slip silently out of the tank and land lightly on the ground. Dim lanterns can be seen around the borders of the territory firmly in the Fire Nations grasp, but Azula had ordered all other lights doused. The problem with fire at night was that it made them a very visible target.

But her senses aren’t telling her to look towards the city. They’re telling her to turn outward, beyond the wall, and towards the bay. Azula narrow her gaze, glancing briefly up at the half-moon. Morning is still hours off, and even she can feel the lethargy that comes with the absence of the sun. If this is another ambush from those Water Tribe barbarians, she’s going to burn their ragged little fleet to the waterline and smile while she does it. They’ve caused her no insignificant amount of duress and frustration.

As Azula and Ty Lee slips past the wall, and the tense sentries, who flinch towards them when they finally notice their passage. Azula can see the bay glittering silver, but any shapes that might be on the water are difficult to make out given the scattered trees and uneven horizon against the dark sky.

“Hm.” Ty Lee hums, and Azula glances at her. Ty Lee isn’t looking towards the bay. She’s turning towards the treeline, and the rocky, forested hills that lead into the mountain. Azula tenses, as her straining ears catch the first clash of steel on steel. Ty Lee’s eyes widen, and both of them take off, quick and quiet over the ground.

Azula does not call for back-up, not yet.

The closer they get, pushing through a thick band of trees and into the clearing where supplies are staged as they get transferred from the riverboats to the ground fleet, Azula narrows down the possibility of attackers. There are no shouts, no guttering spouts of flame. Just the clash and spark of blades against blades.

Azula stops shy of stepping out into the open, and Ty Lee stops on a copper coin without hesitation or much effort, precisely behind Azula’s left side. Azula narrows her eyes at the combatants.

There are only two, with four blades between them, flashing with moonlight. Azula recognizes the stature and low, long tail of hair belonging to Colonel Ling Yao, and takes a flicker of a moment to appreciate his fighting form.

But she also recognizes his opponent, the grinning mask of the Blue Spirit, a fugitive upon whose head Admiral Zhao had placed a not insignificant sum months ago.

For aiding the Avatar’s escape.

Azula looks to Ty Lee, and directs her with small, precise motions. Ty Lee nods solemnly, grey eyes wide and watching the fight, but then she hesitates, brows scrunching up. Azula glowers at her.

“You’re _good_.” Colonel Yao grunts, bending to a knee as the Blue Spirit drives down, their blades sparking blue and yellow from the force. Good steel, all of them. The Blue Spirit doesn’t speak, but suddenly shifts balance, making a _twist_ -

Colonel Yao doesn’t cry out, but Azula can see the blood shimmer, as the drops fling off the blade of his enemy.

Azula snarls, and punches a fury of blue fire at the enemy as she springs into the clearing.

“Wait!” Ty Lee cries out, too late, and Azula is already waiting for the screams that don’t come. The blue flames part with a splitting whip of white fire, and Azula freezes for a moment, because she had thought this a mere mortal enemy, but if the _spirits_ are involved…

But no…one hand holds the blade, two now formed back into one, and the other holds white fire, - _flickering violet, flickering gold_ \- like something out of a spirit-story, but the dark sleeve is singed, and she can see the sear of passing heat on the revealed pale skin.

“ _Azula_!” Zuko growls, aggrieved, and reaches up to push off his mask.

“Prince Zuko!” Colonel Yao pales with the realization, and drops to a knee, laying down his swords. Blood drips down one side of his face. “Forgive me, I did not know.”

“ _That_.” Zuko says flatly. “was the point.”

“What are you doing here, Zuzu?” Azula snaps, striding towards her brother, curious in spite of herself, and more tense than she thinks she ought to feel.

“Don’t be a brat, Azula.” Zuko retorts, and then sighs, eyeing his burnt sleeve with aggravation. He shakes his head at it, and then glances back up to her. “I’m sorry I’m a day late.”

Azula crosses her arms, frowning. “My next supply train isn’t due until tomorrow.” She says. Or later today, as it would happen, given the hour.

Zuko cocks his head, brows sharply cut. “For your birthday.” He clarifies. “I’ve brought a gift for you.”

Azula blinks, surprised. Was it already her birthday? How odd. She hadn’t even… “How sentimental.” She comments, eyeing her fingernails for grit. They’re tearing again, her once long, beautiful claws now ragged and uneven. She lifts her hand to her mouth, preparing to tear one more ragged edge off for the irritation.

“Don’t do that!” Zuko says irritably, hand snapping out to grab her wrist. “ _Honestly_.” He mutters.

“It’s annoying.” Azula complains, but doesn’t fight his grip as he turns her hand far more gently.

“You can get infections doing it like that.” Zuko mutters. “Where’s my knife?” He asks, then spots it on her belt and holds out his hand. Azula scowls irritably and hands it over. She’s rather fond of it, and had been aggravated over the idea of ever giving it back, but, to her surprise, Zuko does not place it at his own waist. Instead, he carefully brings the blade to her fingers, turning her hand just so.

Colonel Yao, regained of his feet, tenses, but doesn’t interfere. Azula would be amused, because the idea of Zuko stabbing her was laughable, except….

Except she hadn’t known Zuko could actually use a blade.

She hadn’t known he could be _deadly_ with one, before she saw what she just did.

Zuko as she remembers him had always been…softer, slower, weaker. Oh, he always tried so hard, but she was simply _better_.

He catches the edge of her nail carefully with the blade, and looks up at his sister, pausing his hands for a moment. “I know what I’m doing.” He says. “Trust me.”

Azula narrows her eyes, and nods to hide the swallow she makes at the very idea. His hands are bigger than hers, hard and calloused in a way they’d never been before. He’s taller than he was, his hair thicker and longer, but loose around his face. The scar twists in the moonlight, dark and silky, and his eyes gleam like lamps. There’s a thin sharpness to his face, to his knuckles and his stature that lacks all the softness of his youth.

For an instant there in the dark, he is an utter stranger.

He trims her nails with a deft quickness, gentle and precise, and Azula looks away, no longer concerned that he may nick her with the blade. Her hands aren’t soft anymore either. They’re  grimy and chafed and stained with the soot that rains near constant from the sky.

Her gaze lands on the mask, and Azula frowns.

“You’re the Blue Spirit?” She demands.

Zuko snorts.

“You helped the Avatar escape!” Azula hisses, jerking her hand free. Zuko gives her a flat look and takes it back.

“Do you really think I would have allowed _Zhao_ to take my only way home from me?” Zuko growls, though his hands are still very careful, holding hers.

“The Avatar destroyed the northern fleet because you let him go-!” Azula snarls, blue sparks flying off her fingertips. Zuko doesn’t flinch, but his fingers clench around hers, his grip bruising for a moment.

“The avatar is a twelve year old boy, raised a pacifist.” Zuko snarls back, quiet and low and dangerous. His hands are _hot_. “The northern fleet was destroyed by a great spirit. A royally _pissed off_ great spirit, whose rage was brought upon us by Zhao. Because that _idiot_ -“ Zuko’s hands become searing, and he lets Azula jerk herself free as that eerie white fire ghosts along his fingers, sparking orange. “-thought he would receive _glory_ if he murdered the moon.” His fist clench, and Azula can hear his teeth grind. Colonel Yao’s eyes widen, and Ty Lee looks stricken.

“The red sky…” Ty Lee whispers faintly. She was deeply spiritual individual, and even the memory of that - that _wrongness_ , made her shiver with dread.

“I don’t believe in spirit tales.” Azula says stubbornly, willfully ignoring the fact that she had minutes ago mistaken Zuko for a spirit himself.

He smiles darkly, and it is so like their fathers smile that Azula feels her mouth go dry. “Then you won’t believe that you owe Princess Yue of the Northern Water Tribe your life, and my life, and the life of every one us who ever crossed the seas. She sacrificed herself to restore La.” He looks up, towards the half moon, and the smile fades into something thin and regretful. “Tui slaughtered that fleet by the thousands, and that was showing us _mercy_.” He looks back down at his sister, his eyes glittering and fey. “I _saw_ him, Azula. I watched him _take_ Zhao.”

Azula won’t deny him that. Can’t. Not when he’s looking at her like that, like she isn’t even really there at all.

So she redirects his attention.

“So you dressed up in a _theater_ _mask_.” She scoffs.

The tension eases, and Zuko’s mouth twists wryly. “Three years and the most recognizable description in the world. I had to do _something_ , Azula.”

“But why….”She questions, her gaze sharpening once more. “Are you doing it _here_?”

He fidgets, and his posture stoops a little. He looks sheepish. “I’m uh….technically supposed to be in the colonies right now? The Fire Sages…and the nobles…and rather everyone else isn’t particularly… _pleased_ with the idea of all the heirs in the line of succession being in the middle of the war.” He shrugs, and he looks like her silly older brother again.

Azula rolls her eyes. “So you snuck off to see me. _How_ _sweet_.” She coos. He glares at her again, and his glares have a feral edge he didn’t even used to know how to muster. Zuko didn’t used to have that kind of fury in his soul, that intimacy with hate that it took to burn like that, that _killer_ instinct. She’s morbidly curious about where he got it from.

“I came here to make sure you end up coming home.” Zuko says sharply.

Azula sucks in a hissing breath. “I don’t need your help!”

“I didn’t ask if you did.” Zuko retorts. “And I didn’t come here to argue.”

“Then I guess you should go home!” Azula snaps. Ty Lee and Colonel Yao glance at each other, and edge away. It’s getting very warm, and while the blue and white sparks are pretty, they’re also pretty painful when they landed on you.

 _He’s mocking her_ , Azula rages. _It isn’t fair! She’d done everything demanded of her_!

Azula chokes, when his arms wrap around her, her burning hands shielded by one of his white-hot ones, kept carefully away from both of their skins. She breathes in sharply, her nose pressed uncomfortably into her brothers shirt, smelling of burnt silk and male sweat and the flowers back home. His chin briefly brushes across the top of her head, and then he’s letting her go. She shoves him away, heedless that his shirt burns where she touches him again, even as he swears and swats out the flare of fire.

“ _Don’t_.” She snarls. “Do that.”

The look he gives her is so full of understanding that she wants him _dead_. She _hates_ him, more than anyone else in the world, and he’s the only person she thinks she’s ever truly believed loved her. Was _capable_ of loving her. Azula snatches her knife back from him and sheathes it, regardless of the fact that he wasn’t finished with her nails. She’ll figure it out for herself later, and curse the entire time that self-care given limited resources was not an applicable subject in an imperial education.

“You have a foothold inside the wall?” Zuko comments, not really asking.

“Yes.” She grinds out. He tilts his head, peering in that general direction, but unable to actually see it through the trees. Azula briefly wonders how, exactly, Zuko _got_ here.

“You truly are the pride of Sozin’s legacy.” He says, and Azula shoots him a hard look. He smirks at her. “More is the pity.” He adds, a little bit sarcastically. Azula narrows her eyes again, her lips thinning.

“What.” Azula says, instead of asking why.

“I have a proposition for you, sister mine.” He says, his voice tinged with wryness. “It’s going to be everything you’ve ever wanted, and you’re going to hate it.”


	24. Chapter 23

“What a melodramatic statement.” Azula preens a lock of her hair, scoffing.

Zuko adjusts his balance, and all but sneers down at her. “Don’t act like him.” ~~~~

“Or what?” She dares him, because she has to. He can’t do that to her, can’t look down on her, can’t control her. She won’t let him. She’ll _fight_. No matter what he thinks he has that she might want.

He sighs, shrugging off anger like a worn cloak. He rubs at the unscarred side of his face with one hand, and when he looks at her again, he’s _looking_ at her.

He keeps changing, standing there in front of her, like a mirage.

He’s quiet as minutes tick by. Azula doesn’t move, barely breathes, waiting for him return to her challenge. Ty Lee fidgets, as she does, and Colonel Yao’s eyes shift, his expression coldly stoic, for once, very unlike him.

“What do you _want_ , Azula?” He finally asks, and he asks it like…like everything she is, everything she has ever done, will be judged by her answer.

He’s seems fey again, strange and dangerous and how silly is that? How odd, how chilled it makes her, to stand in her brother’s presence and feel almost…afraid.

“Why did you tell me that I was the best firebender in the world?” She asks, instead of answering. She wants to know. She _needs_ to know.

“Because it’s the only thing about you I know to be absolutely true.” He says flatly. He twists another grimacing smile, and holds up a palm-full of white fire. It flickers, and she sees it again. Gold, violet. Hints of green, tongues of blue, the occasional flare of red and orange. He stares at it a moment, and then looks back up to her, his eyes shadowed with pain.

“I didn’t know.” Is what he says, but it sounds like _I’m sorry_.

Azula scoffs, but words catch in her throat. She swallows, and her eyes prickle, but her voice clears. “What do _you_ want?” She asks lowly.

He smiles again, and it’s a real smile, quiet and soft and full of promise. It reminds her of when they were children, and he’d sneak her out of the nursery, leading her by the hand, to steal sugared plums and honey-cakes from the kitchens. Before she’d ever bent her first flame.

“It took me awhile to get there, to actually understand what it meant to _want_.” Zuko says, with a soft snort at his own expense. “I _want_ this war to end.” He tells her, meeting her gaze with one that burns like his white fire – shining and otherworldly. “So I will _make_ it end, and I _will_ do _anything_ for it.”

Azula studies at him, clinically, critically, coldly.

She believes him.

“Then tell me,” She says. “How you’re going to give me everything I’ve ever wanted, and why I’m going to hate it.”

“Hm.” He humms, nodding, and turns away. “Walk with me.”

Azula rolls her eyes and falls into step with him, as he takes her further from the wall and towards the river. Colonel Yao and Ty Lee hesitate, and follow at a few paces behind, allowing the two royals their privacy.

“What would you do for the throne, Azula?” He inquires.

“Everything.” She says, without hesitation. Her brother smirks. “Are you sure?” He asks.

Azula narrows her eyes. “Yes.” She says with a hiss.

“Good.” He says. “Then I want you to abandon this siege, and this city.”

Azula doesn’t even blink, as the words leave his mouth. She moves, and it utterly surprised to find her wrist caught in an iron grip, before her blade can reach his throat, and the chill presence of his sword levelled across her stomach. Their gazes meet in the darkness, and a fury builds inside her. He doesn’t even look shocked. He just looks amused.

“You’re so predictable, Azula. You think I don’t know that you will always go for wherever it will hurt the most?” Zuko says, voice low.

“Father would never order a retreat!” Azula snarls.

“Of course not.” Zuko says simply. “The man has never been on a battlefield in his life. He doesn’t care who lives or dies, or how. Even if it’s you.”

“And you do?” Azula scoffs. Zuko tilts his head. “Of course I do.”

Her brother, as ever, is _sincere_.

“This is treason.” Azula says, just as simply, pulling back her hand and letting fall to her side.

“This is what it takes to save our people, Azula. This is what it takes to get what we want.” Zuko says, his eyes sharp and gleaming, like the edge of his sword. “You and everyone under your command, this city will swallow you. Abandon the siege of Ba Sing Se.”

Azula takes a breathe, studying him critically. _He’s not guessing. He’s not even being dramatic._ Azula realizes, studying the hardness in his face, the look in his eyes. _He knows something._

And he was willing it withhold it, if she didn’t agree. Even if it would get her, and, as he so eloquently put it, everyone under her command killed.

He was actually serious, and she was unduly impressed.

 _He wants to save me._ Azula thinks sharply. _But he will let me die, if he has to._

Anything, he had said, to end this war.

“Very well.” Azula says carefully, “But where, pray Agni, do I take them? If I disobey father, we can never go home.”

“You won’t have to worry about father very much longer, Azula.” Zuko mutters, sheathing his sword and reaching up to push his hair out of his face, grimacing at the pull of the sears on his arm. “Take them to the old kingdom of Taku, and fortify it, as best you can.”

Azula didn’t stumble, but she did hesitate, a breath, before following Zuko to the edge of the water.

“Defiance is one thing, Zuko.” Azula says. “But do you honestly think you can best our father?”

He snorts, and it’s a hard, bitter, almost loathing sound. “I believe I have a chance. But I can’t depose our father and then claim his throne. I’m not Ozai.”

Azula feels…electrified.

“You’re giving it to _me_.” She exclaims, thrilled and faintly disbelieving. “ _You_ are going to make _me_ the Fire Lord.”

He shakes his head at her manner. “Everything you’ve ever wanted.” He promised.

Azula stops herself, clenching a fist and remembering the other half of his claims. “Why am I going to hate it?”

Zuko pauses, looking at her curiously, and then scoffs quietly. “You don’t even hesitate, no matter how hard you’ve tried to make him love you.”

Azula feels like he’s thrown cold water over her, and, naturally, lashes out. “Neither did you.”

Zuko winces, looks up at the stars, and laughs bleakly. “The spirits must laugh at us. Or hate us.”

“Or both.” Azula adds helpfully, and her brother looks back down to earth, and to her.

“Probably both.” He agrees. “And I’m not just going to make you the Fire Lord, Azula. You’re fifteen.”

“Then what are you proposing, exactly?” She says icily, determinately not pouting, even as her arms cross.

“That once peace has been officially signed by all the nations, and we have established a successful colony at Taku, and you are of age, and at least one of us has an heir, then I will officially abdicate the throne, and you will be crowned Fire Lord for the rest of our natural lives.”

Azula rolls her eyes. “Spirits know how long it would take _you_ to produce an heir, Zuko. Can’t I just marry Colonel Yao and consider it done?”

Colonel Yao yelps. “I’m already married!”

“You can’t just claim someone to marry, Azula.” Zuko growls.

“Why not? Father did.”

“We are not Ozai!”

“I’m already married!” Colonel Yao repeats indignantly, and Azula turns to him, baffled.

“What?” She say flatly, to the rather irritable looking Colonel. It sinks in, eventually, slowly, and she feels a flush creep across her face and turns back to her brother.

“The conditions are superfluous.” She argues.

“They’re necessary.” Zuko retorts, seeming somewhat concerned of her embarrassment, given the speculative looks he casts between her and Ling Yao. “First, I want this war to end and _it will end_ , and I can’t actually trust you to make peace. It’s not in your nature.”

Azula scoffs.

“Second,” He continues, giving her a sharp look. “We need the colonies, and the Earth Kingdom will want them back. Taku is…the best compromise I could think of. The islands alone can no longer support all of our people, as they barely could by the time Sozin’s reign was waning.”

Azula frowns at that, as it was not something she’d ever considered before. History always claimed the islands were so prosperous, and they had to have been, in Sozin’s youth. It’s what inspired his grand vision, so the sages said.

“Third, while thirteen may be old enough by our traditions to hold lordship, it’s one thing to head a clan and another entirely to head the entire nation, and lead all other lords and ladies. You’re barely old enough to be on this battlefield, Azula, I’m not putting you on one where you can’t even actually _fight_ your enemies. Not until you’re older, and quite a bit wiser and less cruel.” Zuko says pointedly.

Azula taps her nails along her elbows, displeased at that, but also…off-footed. She’d never had trouble at court, because the court feared her, of course, but…she was not so naïve as to think that it wasn’t her father’s power that protected her as well. She wasn't oblivious to the cold look in some nobles eyes, to the disdain some of the elders held for her. Powerful elders.

“I have done what has been necessary.” Azula retorts. “Better cruelty than weakness.”

Zuko laughs at her. “No one could possibly accuse you of being weak, Azula. As for the last two conditions…the line of succession has proven to be rather more precarious than it should have ever been, Azula, and the court knows it. The sages know it. Father’s usurpation of the throne fractured the trust that was held for our divine right to rule. Dethroning him is hardly going to repair it, but I at least have the support of the elder Fire Sages, where he does not and did not. If I am to put you on the throne, if we are to secure our lineage, then one of us must have an heir to inherit. You are mine, obviously, but if I abdicate and you have none, they’ll take us both for fools. I won’t set you up to be cast down.”

Azula swallows against an irritating tightness in her throat, telling herself furiously not to believe it. They’d been rivals all their lives, there was no way he’d simply just…

There was no way.

He couldn’t.

He wouldn’t.

“I’m not Ozai,” Zuko reminds her, as if sensing her doubt, and she glares at him, fingers digging painfully into her arms. “And I’m not mom.”

“This isn’t fair.” Azula hisses.

“I told you,” Zuko says ruefully. “that you were going to hate it.”


	25. Chapter 24

Azula can’t look at him, and so she looks at the river. The water dances with shadows, flickering with pale moonlight, and Azula misses the smell of salt from the sea, misses the islands, misses home.

“Why don’t you want it?” Azula asks flatly, because it is the one thing she cannot understand. He’d wanted it once, just as much as she ever did, and she doesn’t know why he would just…give it up. “The throne was your birthright.” No matter how she’d tried to steal it from him.

“No it wasn’t.” Zuko laughs darkly, shaking his head. “The throne was Lu Ten’s birthright. And it isn’t that I don’t want it, Azula. It’s just that I don’t think I could survive it. I can’t do what you do, and just…burn parts of myself away until I’m what I need to be.”

Azula flinches, still not looking at him, because she forgets, sometimes, that he’s the one person in the world who could understand her completely. Not always, but sometimes, all they had to do was look at each other, and they just _knew_.

“You wouldn’t make a bad Fire Lord.” She admits reluctantly, watching ripples shift beneath the stream.

“Thank you for the vote of confidence.” Zuko says dryly. “I can end this war, I know that. I believe I can even make peace, but what comes after is going to be harder, sister mine. I can face the world for our people, but I don’t think I can fight our people, and I’m afraid that they are going to fight. That we just might tear ourselves apart.”

“You’re talking about civil war, Zuko.” Azula says sharply, looking back to him.

“Yeah.” He says glumly. “What we do is going to change the world, change our way of life, and what Azulon has done to our people, to our nation…I don’t think our people know how to be at peace, anymore. I can make them stop fighting, but how do I make them stop believing? How do I convince them that hatred and anger is not what makes them strong? That the peoples of the world are different from us, but are not less than us? How am I supposed to fight my own people, Azula, when they refuse to make peace? I couldn’t do it. I don’t think I have the strength.”

“And you think I could.” Azula states, the conclusion obvious.

“I do.” Zuko nods, and Azula knows it is not the benediction some might think. Zuko’s relentless, but he’s right. He lacks the ruthlessness she has, that makes it so much easier for her to lie, and hurt, and kill.

“If you want to convince our people, brother mine, you should probably start by trying to convince _me_.” Azula points out. “If I’m supposed to be our glorious leader during this…” Azula flickers her fingers, at whatever he decides he wants to call their future problems of civil discontent.

He snickers despite himself. “I know how to convince _you_.” He says, and holds out his hand, sparking a palmfull of that pretty white fire.

Azula lifts a brow, and Zuko tilts his head towards the water. Azula’s brow pinches, and she glances at the river again, quietly rushing by them. She can see his smile spread, from the corner of her eye, and waits for the trick, eyes only half on the water as the ripples shift, with a quiet susurrus.

Fully on the water as a sinewy line breaks the surface, cutting across the shimmer of moonlight, and slinks towards shore. That was no fish.

Azula listens to the blood rush in her ears, as a shadow quietly slips from the shallows, and rises, and rises, silver gleaming off mottled scales, and catching like torches on large, inhuman amber eyes.

The dragon blinks, grinning with a flash of teeth, and Azula forgets to breathe.

Warm breath wafts over her, smelling strongly of hot brine and smoky sulfur, and Azula doesn’t move as that massive maw turns, titling until the large eye is level with her head. A long, surprisingly soft whisker lifts and coils around her hand, feather-like feelers tickling her palm. Azula closes her eyes when she feels the push of something other against her spirit, warm and distinctly intrusive, and she fights, at first, until that foreign presence softens, and her own spirit basks more than burns.

The images that filter behind her eyes hurt, at first, and make her feel dizzy. She can feel Zuko grab her shoulder, steady her, and he doesn’t let go.

She sees herself, through the dragons eye, small and mortal and burning brilliantly, and sharply, half in this world and half in the spirit realm. Some colors are too bright, and others are oddly muted, and she marvels, for a moment, at the glimpse the dragon gives her of Zuko, of the golden glow around the natural light of his own life, the blessing he carries. Her own spirit looks bereft, in comparison, and Azula tenses.

A chuckle drifts across her thoughts, deeper and softer than a humans laugh, and she can feel the sense of teeth in it.

The image shifts, to a sea under a bright sky, and the sense of flying, of the wind catching wings and whistling over scales shivers across her skin, of the sea spray tickling her belly, cooling against the harshness of reflected sun. _Does the sea envy the sky, cub? Both shine, and both have their depths. A dragon does not have to choose which to love._

It’s more image than words, more emotion than thought, but Azula makes sense of it either way. Language has no barriers between spirits.

Azula reaches up, takes her brothers hand, and digs her nails into his skin. _This is a dragon. The dragons are supposed to be dead._

The massive head shifts, and the maw that could swallow her whole grins. _We are fire made flesh. We taught you what you are, do you think we would simply let you force us to die? Flesh is frail, and spirits may fail, but the elements will endure. The cycle and the world will survive you, no matter your crimes. And so will I._

Azula can feel the height of the tallest peak, can feel the touch of stars on scales, the gale of the storm, and she has never felt smaller, never been more insignificant, but the dragon does not look down at her, it looks across.

Azula can’t find her voice, as the dragon eels out of the water, as Ty Lee hops on her toes, excited beyond reason, and Colonel Yao kneels, as it circles them, like the river come to life.

 _You burn, little one_. The dragon whispers, twitching its head when Zuko reaches out to brush his hand across the armored scales around its eye as it winds around until she is once more at its focus. _But you burn everything. Enemies. The world. Yourself. You cannot endure._

 _I can!_ Azula protests, defiant.

The dragon lifts its head, and looks down at her, and she feels foolish, but she _will not_ cower.

 _Fire is more than destruction. More than heat. More than passion._ The dragon settles itself low, lazily, on the riverbank, and Azula can see another twist in the water, revealing dark scales and a breath of steam before vanishing again without so much as a whisper. _You are the fire._

_Let me show you._


	26. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not dead!

Flying, Zuko felt, was incomparable to any other experience. The rippling whistle of the dragons wings as they glided over ocean thermals, the sinuous thrum of powerful muscles twisting and tensing, the flaring heat of the dragons breath, the almost silky feel of glimmering scales, like polished stones, and… _sky_.

There was nothing above and nothing below but stars and reflections on water, and the sheer enormity of _absence_. This, he feels, this is what made the Airbenders.

 _There is power in peace_. Howl-of-the-Storm agrees, with a flickering of images of paper wings over clouds, and sunset-robed figures meditating on ledges on the misty peaks of distant mountains. _But there is more than idleness in those who avow to do no harm._

You can’t share thoughts with a dragon and not feel the memories they shared pressing upon your soul like watermarks on paper.

Rain-soaked figures clinging to horns and harnesses, the curl of wings screaming with the edge of the storm, a storm wider than across than you could walk in a day, pale hands reaching out to feel the edges, to sense its pull and direction, to find its heading, so you could race ahead, so you could warn them-

 _An Airbender on dragonback is a menace._ StormHowl recalls fondly. _But the Stormrider’s were the best of them. Peace is not a matter of blood and violence, but of suffering. To not cause harm was not enough. You must also prevent harm when and where you can, by whatever means you possess._

Zuko closes his eyes, nodding for the dragons wisdom, a balm against his fears and doubt about what he has done, and what he will yet do. _Be brave_ , he tells himself.

In truth, his heart is still miles behind them, hoping his sister will do as she promised, will break the siege and take her forces to Taku.

 _Sky-without-Stars has minded far more difficult cubs_. StormHowl soothes his thoughts. Zuko starts slightly, fingers curling into the dragons mane as the wind whispers over his ears. The dark blue dragon that had volunteered, with lazy deliberation, to accompany StormHowl and Zuko had shown interest in Azula from the start. Her decision to stay, when Zuko introduced his sister in the way of the dragons, with a display of blue fire, was, well, quite out of his hands.

But what does she want of my sister?

 _She wants everything that she is. All dragons are covetous and vain, and will keep that which pleases them. To turn a promising spark into a glorious blaze is what we were born for. Starless has found a potential that pleases her, and seeks to amuse herself._ StormHowl offers a dragons chuckle, and Zuko can feel the echo of himself and StormHowl compared with the other pair.

 _I sought to learn_. Zuko points out, learning to pour his meaning through his spirit so that he may speak in this way. _Azula considers herself already a master_.

 _Starless will show her the way_. StormHowl murmurs. _She is the oldest of us now, save Ran and Shaw_.

Zuko’s breath stutters and chokes on a welling of deep grief that follows that thought, echoes of glittering green and an almost familiar face scratching against his mind.

 _Who was that_?

The grief recedes, only a little.

 _Bright-of-the-Summer-Green, and Kuzon Guard-of-the-Nest, who rescued a stolen egg and became her rider._ StormHowl lingers over the memory of a gangly youth, toppling over an emerald tail and laughing as he lay in the dirt, the green dragon wafting a huff of breath over his fallen form in tickled amusement. _She is my spirit-wed._

Dragons don’t have a word for wife or husband or mate. Their bonds, legend says, endure death and transcend lifetimes, for reincarnation is the way of the world, but for a dragon, no matter the ages and trials, they love only once.

 _Did Kuzon really kill her_? Zuko thinks before he can stop himself from asking such a horrible question.

 _He tried very hard not to._ A less young man, lines beginning to mark his eyes and mouth, and his limbs solid with muscle, his eyes shadowed with fear, and a green dragon, roaring fury and loss. _Dragons defied the will of the Lord-of-the-Fire-Islands, and so he sought to snuff us out, blaze and ember. They were very brave, and clever, and saved many by their actions, Kuzon and SummerBright. A façade of loyalty to shield those who could not bow, they deemed, was a worthy sacrifice to save innocent lives. Kuzon-the-Rider carved the wings from SummerBright’s back, and presented them as utter proof. But for all their bravery and their cleverness, she sickened of the wound that did not properly heal, and she died. Kuzon-SummerBright’s-chosen never forgave himself, and will never fly again._

Zuko could feel the horror and the pain of it, the blinding, bleeding grief, and the persistent, quiet love the grey dragon still held for his beloveds rider, who carried their safety with him still, even now old and grey and weakening.

 _I’ll give you what she died for._ Zuko swears.

 _Did you think you would live, cub, if I thought you would not?_ The dragon inquires, centuries of patience and cold rage seeping beneath the surface.

The dragon twists in the sky, violent and fluid, sending the world spinning as Zuko clings to his soul, and then rises, and rises, until no ocean landing would save his life from the fall. The air gets harder to breathe, and colder, biting at his skin, but his own mortality isn’t what Zuko dreads.

He dreads only that he will fail, for all his efforts and promises.

If he fails, Aang spends the rest of his life in cell beneath the ground, gasping for air in a world without sky. If he fails, Kotone could lose her life for nothing more than the nature of her heritage, now marked upon her skin for all the world to see. If he fails, his people will never again see dragons fly. If he fails, his father will raze the world to the ground.

 _I live because I must_ , Zuko snarls wordlessly, watching the stars wheel as they head for home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No real plot progress, but, this is what spooled out when i sat down to write today, so...


End file.
